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THE PATH OF VISION 



BOOKS BY MR. RIHANI 

POETRY 

"The Luzumiyat," a Translation of Qua- 
trains from the Work of the Arab Poet- 
Philosopher, Abu'1-Ala. Second Edition. 

A Chant of Mystics and Other Poems. 

PROSE 

The Descent of Bolshevism. 
The Book of Khalid. 



THE PATH OF 
VISION 



Pocket Essays of East and West 



By 
AMEEN RIHANI 



NEW YORK 

JAMES T. WHITE & CO. 

1 92 1 






COPYRIGHTED 1 92 1 BY 
JAMES T. WHITE & CO. 

©CU622141 



TO MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 
PART FIRST 

I. THE PATH OF VISION 9 

II. THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY. ... 20 

III. THE HIGHEST IDEAL 29 

IV. MINDS AND MONOMINDS 41 

V. TOURING AND COMMUTING 50 

VI. GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD.. 58 

VII. A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 64 

VIII. THE MOTHER OF COMMON SENSE 72 
IX. THE QUESTION OF PONTIUS 

PILATE 83 

X. MYSELF WHEN YOUNG DID 

EAGERLY FREQUENT 91 

PART SECOND 

I. FROM CONCORD TO SYRIA 101 

II. MY NATIVE HORIZON 109 

III. MINE OWN COUNTRY 120 

IV. OVER ANCIENT BABYLON 135 

V. OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 144 

VI. THE ORIENTAL HERITAGE 157 

VII. CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 164 

VIII. CITIZEN AND YOGI 173 

IX. THE CURIOSITY OF THE OCCI- 
DENTAL 182 

X. THE LYING ORIENTAL 189 



THE PATH OF VISION 

WEAK and oppressed nations are fund- 
amentally spiritual ; strong nations 
are, as a rule, chiefly materialistic. The 
one, cherishing religious ideals, soars to 
certain spiritual heights and now and then 
produces a seer to justify its languor and 
indolence; the other, seeking material 
things, bores into the earth for its treasures 
and keeps going down, down till its dyna- 
mic forces reach an impenetrable sterility 
and explode in a sudden, terrible reaction. 
The life of such a nation is symptomatic of 
a diseased state of the soul. The life of the 
other undermines, to say the least, its phy- 
sical strength. The dwarfing tendency is 
equally potent in both. But a nation without 
a soul is more grotesque, more hideous than 
a nation of ascetics. 

It is not my purpose to startle and pro- 
voke the reader with sweeping generalities, 
or to bamboozle him with dogmas old in 
garments new. The foregoing paragraph 
imposes, therefore, the necessity of a little 
[9] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

digression. To say that we in America are 
primarily materialistic is to repeat a com- 
monplace. To say that there is a religious 
revival in the country, — that we are begin- 
ning again to have spiritual needs, aspiring, 
longing, groping for the higher things of 
life, is to echo what is but a vague expres- 
sion of our present state of unrest and 
discontent. 

Before we admit or question the sincerity 
and the soundness of this spiritual revival, 
let us inquire first what is meant by the 
spiritual. Does it consist in turning, for 
guidance and solace, to the Orient, or to 
Christianity, or to spiritism, or to the So- 
ciety for Psychical Research, or to theoso- 
phy and mystic lore? There is in all these 
movements of the present day a common 
desire, to be sure, to turn from materialism, 
if only for a spell — and for a change. But 
every definition of the spiritual that they 
embody differs substantially from the other. 

The question is, Can our spiritual as- 
pirations be realized only by turning to 
Christ or to Mother Church? Must they, 
[10] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

to be sound, have a scientific basis? Are 
they, to be genuine, to come only from the 
Orient ? Should they, to be vital and vital- 
izing, emanate from the hidden sources of 
mysticism and occultism? Or are they 
genuine and sound and vital and enduring 
only when they are articulate in the rapping 
table or behind the velvet curtains of the 
medium ? 

If I were to go out seeking enlightenment 
on the subject, I would find myself in a 
haberdashery of spiritual fads, or a maze 
of spiritual profundities, or a Vantine-shop 
of pseudo-Orientalisms. No, dear Reader, 
I am not going to suggest to you such a 
futile, though sometimes amusing, adven- 
ture. Let me assume, therefore, that, like 
myself, you have doffed the uniform of 
religion and shaken off the fetters of 
dogma; that you sometimes go into a mu- 
seum to see your superstitions and your 
ancestors' exhibited in glass cabinets, or into 
a lecture hall to hear a professor dissert 
upon the protoplasm and the chemical basis 
of life; — that you even go to church now 

[in 



THE PATH OF VISION 

and then to rest and relax. Very well. 
What is there left us then? 

If we are not wholly satisfied with mate- 
rialism, if we do not find sufficient nourish- 
ment in the fruits of science, if the church 
has become a cave of winds and the creeds a 
desert of sterility, where, I ask you, shall 
we find the comfort and solace that that 
immaterial something within us longs for 
and craves? In the mystic circles of the 
so-called Orientalists of our day. whose 
spiritualities have ever an eye to the news- 
paper column and another to the cash 
register? In the platitudes and inanities 
that are doled out from a pulpit which was 
once resplendent with the glory and power 
of the church? In the book of the psycho- 
analyst or in the records of the Society for 
Psychical Research, where our restlessness 
is patted on the back and our crying soul- 
hunger is silenced with a cheese sandwich 
from the cupboard of the dissecting room? 
Or cheated with a toy from the show-case 
of classified abnormalties ? Gramercy, no. 

What is the spiritual then ? And where- 
[12] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

for do we seek it. I have made it clear, 
I think, that neither in the religious dog- 
matism of the past nor in the spiritual 
gropings and posturings of the present do 
the higher aspirations of a free-thinking, 
emancipated being find adequate expres- 
sion. Once we used to pray: now we 
philosophize. Once we were good because 
we believed in a future reward or feared 
a future punishment; but now, that we 
neither believe in the one nor fear the other, 
we are seldom inclined to make the sacrifice 
that goodness often entails. And in our 
desire to achieve the good and true — far be 
it from me to deny the existence, even the 
sincrity of such a desire — we often choose 
the line of least resistance. We must be 
practical, and we must have our creature 
comforts. Moreover, we expect, we insist 
upon, our reward within a certain time in 
the material things of the world, even 
though it be a column of gossip in the daily 
press. No checks on heaven, please, no 
promisory notes — and no ethical evasions. 
We are a practical people — verv busy — in 
[131 



THE PATH OF VISION 

a hurry. We have no time for ethics. 

This is the gospel of trade, which we 
hold sacred. Barter is one of its cardinal 
tenets. We are no longer such fools as to 
throw our bread on the water or to squan- 
der our goodness on the wind. Visionaries, 
to be sure, we are not. Now, it is this 
attitude, this commercial consciousness, 
which we have faithfully upheld in precept 
and practice, that is creating in us a sub- 
conscious reaction. This is the source, I 
maintain, of all our restlessness, our dis- 
satisfaction, our gropings and longings for 
that something which materialism does not 
give. The principle of barter leaves us in 
the end disconsolate, devoid of sympathy, 
and deploring the lack of sympathy in 
others. 

We are, in a word, drifting away from 
the path of vision. We no longer find joy. 
as did the ancients, in pure thought. Prag- 
matism and utilitarianism are our gods. 
We would make religion sweep our streets, 
deodorize our slums. We lament the waste 
of water in a cataract, the loss of energy 
[14] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

in an electric storm. We deplore the fu- 
tility of an abstract idea, an intellectual 
image. We would leave nothing for the 
soul and mind. Even such ideals as are 
purely spiritual we would materialize to 
serve a passing and questionable need. 

The Sufi, for instance, has evolved a 
theory of colors with which to guide his 
path of vision. It makes very pleasant 
reading in the book of mysticism. To him 
colors denote different states of soul, and 
point the way to different goals — to a 
union, partial or complete, with humanity 
or divinity, or a progressive union from 
one to the other, and so forth. How futile 
to us these arbitrary denotations. But the 
Sufi, who sees colors with closed eyes, can 
distinguish all the variations of a chromatic 
circle as it develops from a point in Ver- 
million. And he finds ineffable joy in 
beholding the development and verifying, 
as it were, his progress in the path of union 
and vision. 

"The soul gives sight to the eyes," says 
a Sanskrit aphorism, "and he who gives 
[15] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

sight to the soul is Siva." The Sufi accepts 
this, changing Allah for Siva. With him, 
colors are as real to the soul as they are 
to the naked eye. But the scientist and the 
esthete of to-day, who have also developed 
a theory of colors, consider only the ma- 
terial, the physical side of the matter. They 
can see colors only with the naked eye. 
They have, therefore, divided them into 
three classes : namely, the palliative, the 
stimulative, the excitative. And one lady 
I know, a very charming personality and 
very erudite, who commercializes the scien- 
tific theory of colors, and looses her vision 
of the beautiful in the process. Personally, 
I prefer to hear a discourse on the sub- 
ject than to see the material exterioriza- 
tions of it. Indeed, there are things that 
are purely for the soul and mind. And 
whatever beauty and charm they may have, 
is lost entirely in the materialization. 

"A body," says Umapati in a chapter on 
the Soul's Enlightenment, "lives by union 
with the soul; so the embodied soul lives 
by union with pure Thought." 
[16] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

This is the highest, noblest form of 
spirituality; — the divine essence, which can 
be attained only by those who follow de- 
votedly the path of vision, — those who seek 
the light that bridges the darkness between 
eye and soul, and without which there can 
be no vision. But there is what might be 
called a workaday spirituality, which is 
within the reach of all. And we need not 
be afraid to yield in this to the practical 
spirit of the times to discover the light 
within us. For the path of vision, which 
isolates for a time the individual, brings 
him in the end, if his patience and devotion 
do not give way, to complete union, like 
the Sufi, with humanity and God. 

And it will then dawn upon him that 
to give without expecting a return of any 
kind, immediate or distant, is as natural as 
to accept the gifts of the sun and the air 
and the mountain streams. Indeed, we can 
be religious without being conscious of it ; — 
we can be religious without religiosity. To 
invest our heart-capital in the inherent 
goodness of humanity, to save a drowning 
[17] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

swimmer, as Thoreau says, and go our 
way; — this is the practical workaday spir- 
ituality which either points to us the path 
of vision or unfolds before us, according 
to our degree of enlightenment, one or 
more of its hidden secrets. Which is a 
reward greater and more enduring than 
anything the world can give. It is the har- 
mony we achieve within us ; the satisfaction 
we feel in a healthy, strength -giving re- 
action; the knowledge and power that 
every noble, unselfish deed affords ; the 
only reward, after all, in our triumphs and 
our only consolation in defeat. 

Nay, there is no such thing as defeat for 
those who achieve harmony within. There 
is no such thing as disappointment for those 
who continue to cherish the selflessness of 
which is born the noblest inner self. There 
is no such thing as failure for those who 
invest in the potentialities of the Ideal of 
the Soul. And no matter how humble and 
obscure, how poor or how rich in the ma- 
terial things of the earth, the spiritually- 
bound and spiritually-directed of men, 
[18] 



THE PATH OF VISION 



though they may not be counted among the 
great of history, are the true heroes of the 
race, the agents of the World-Spirit. 



[19] 



THE PATH OF VISION 
II 

THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY 

EXPERIENCE is knowledge ; but knowl- 
edge, when it is sought only as a 
material resource, is not always a blessing, 
Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with 
those who lack vision, is not always power. 
Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, 
when it is induced by apathy, is not in the 
least a virtue. But even though experience 
often woos cynicism, breeds complaisance, 
and engenders cowardice, it has in it, never- 
theless, the seeds of knowledge and wisdom 
and power. 

Some one, if not ourselves, is better, to 
be sure, for what we know. Some one, 
if not ourselves, is wiser for what we 
suffer. A thought in the crucible of life 
melts into the thought of the world ; . the 
footsteps of a pioneer become ultimately 
the highway of a nation ; the heroism of an 
individual becomes the trodden path of a 
race. Every human action, collective or 
[20] 



THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY 

otherwise, has in it the possibility of a cre- 
ative or a destructive force. We stop in 
our work, but we do not know, we can not 
know, where our work really ends. It may 
never end, for that matter. 

Through the scintellating candor of fol- 
lies, the mirage of illusions, the unlighted 
labyrinths of realities, it goes on, with us 
or without us, perpetuating itself and its 
fruition. True, we are often lifted by it to 
cold barren heights, or led into a chamber 
of horrors. Hence the cowardice that often 
becomes supreme, the complaisance that 
often is the harbinger of moral decrepitude. 

A diversity of experience, to be sure, 
enriches life; but its reward, to those who 
deliberately, self-consciously seek it, seldom 
measures up with its promise, when our 
criterion is detached from the higher things 
of the soul. In spite of which, we continue, 
after all our realizations or disappoint- 
ments, to reach for something beyond the 
realities of experience, in the distances of 
unknown possibilities. And what were life, 
indeed, without the horizon of the spirit, 
[21] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

and without an eye to see the horizon? 
What were life without that potentiality of 
mystery that holds out to us, across the 
glamors of the mirage and the dusky 
opacities of reality, when we awaken from 
the somnambulism of self-consciousness, 
the nectar of love and assurance and peace. 

But we boast nowadays of being free 
and untramelled; we glory in the right to 
pursue the light within us, which, under the 
exigencies of a highly evolutionized society, 
seldom leads us outside of Self. And we 
call it the pursuit of happiness. In which 
forsooth, through the little heart-thrills and 
heart-aches of experience, we shatter one 
illusion after another. 

And we seldom stop to ask ourselves 
whether such a course makes for a greater 
freedom and a healthier consciousness. We 
often forget too that in the cult of the Ego 
the worship of unconventionality becomes 
itself a conventionality most rigid and 
austere. It is, in fact, the conventionality 
of the elect — the conventionality supreme. 

Now, if life were as simple as a multi- 
[22] 



THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY 

plication table., to shatter all its. illusions 
would be the only way to re-form and re- 
build it on a sounder and more enduring 
foundation. By all means, we should begin 
with realities — at the very bottom of stern, 
bitter realities. But are not the most ob- 
vious facts in life liquid or malleable? Is 
there such a thing as a bald and finite 
reality, divested of all spiritual or moral or 
social or physical associations? Is there 
such a thing as an isolated material fact, 
which you could dispose of as if it were a 
banana peel in your way? Why, even the 
most degenerate of beings is a vital link in 
the chain of social and spiritual possibilities. 
Indeed, every reality is in itself an un- 
dying source of myterious growth and 
decay. Even the theologian, like the scien- 
tist, recognizes the theory of causation and 
the continuity of the natural law. Neither 
good nor evil, in this sense, is a hard fact, 
but a liquid phenomenon. And every indivi- 
dual manifestation, every given fact is rela- 
ted to thousands, millions of its kind that 
precede and follow. Repentance, for in- 
[23] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

stance, never remedies a wrong act. It only 
complicates it. For though the wrong may 
cease, temporarily or permanently, the act 
continues — becomes a part of the unwritten 
social law. Likewise, a definite conscious- 
ness, blossoming in one individual, may 
have its roots in a generation that is already 
extinct, and may waft its seeds to genera- 
tions unborn. It is because we live mostly 
in the present, however, that we only see 
the link in the chain of circumstances, and 
we often mistake effects for causes. Never- 
theless, we pretend to be able to define the 
confusion within us. 

Psychology, we call to our aid. But civ- 
ilized man has but recently began to study 
the underlying strata of his intellectual and 
spiritual make-up. We are still lisping 
in the hornbook of psychology. Why then 
put on dionysian airs and bamboozle our- 
selves and the world with introspective 
profundities? Or with candor, measured 
and designed? Or with loud, unreserved 
avowals of seeking and understanding the 
re-actions of life upon the Ego? 
[24] 



THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY 

For this is one of the dominating intel- 
lectual passions of the age. We seek ex- 
perience only to see how it reacts upon us. 
In other words, we do not give for the sake 
of giving and the joy in the giving, but only 
for the sake of studying its effect upon 
ourselves. We do not seek in experience 
the hidden and oft times remote agencies 
of spriritual growth and betterment, but 
the palpable, material, and immediate 
returns. 

I do not say, however, that this is 
prompted wholly by selfish motives. On 
the contrary, the selfishness, if any, springs 
from an illusory extension of Self — a fic- 
titiousness of our own making. It is the 
result of an individualism abnormally and 
artificially developed — an individualism of 
the hot-house. It is the Ego taking an es- 
pecial delight in its grotesqueries, revelling 
in its own madness, boasting even of its 
morbid, cancerous growth. The soul is 
turned into a clinic, as it were; the mind, 
into an asylum. This is the kind of ex- 
perience that leads into the chamber of 
[25] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

horrors; and it is responsible, even in real 
art, for the spiritual bankruptcy of the 
Western world. 

We are told that people who disarm us 
with their candor, who discount our sus- 
picion with a startling confession, are not 
capable of deceiving. But the eye very 
often belies the tongue. A delicious can- 
dor, a surface sincerity goes little into the 
soul of things — the hidden springs of 
reality. When a woman mundane, for in- 
stance, tells you that her hair is a wig, her 
complexion, paste and cream and rouge 
and art, might not this show of bank- 
rupt pulchritude be designed to avert 
your eye from the more pathetic bankruptcy 
within? Might it not be what the military 
critics call a diversion? 

To be sure, we would not allow the 
world, if we can help it, to peep into our 
soul, much less to enter it. Our No-Man's- 
Land is hedged about with a wire entan- 
glement of insincerities. And often we take 
refuge in a temperament, a pose, or a mys- 
tic mood. Like certain animals, we take on 
[26] 



THE MYSTICISM OF REALITY 

the color of our surroundings in self de- 
fense. And often aggressively we color our 
own passions, oblivious of the native pig- 
ment hidden in our own consciousness. We 
want to be what we are not, and we are 
petulent, moody, when we fail. 

Albeit, moods, howsoever evanescent, 
have a spiritual significance — a physical im- 
port as well. They are the living cells, as 
it were, of the psychology of our being. 
Even the most elusive, the most sudden and 
unaccountable, has in it the potency of per- 
petuity. It vanishes into our subconscious- 
ness like a waft of perfume or a whiff of 
smoke, and there, in the alembic of mys- 
tery, is invisibly, insensibly transformed or 
crystalized. It evades in either instances 
our mortal ken. Its process of growth can 
not be detected, however keen our percep- 
tive faculty. And a microscope of moods 
has not yet been invented. Let us then 
respect the aura of mystery — the etherial, — 
spiritual and moral, — emanations of every 
reality. And the trick of candor and sin- 
cerity as well. Our psychological analysis 
[27]. 



THE PATH OF VISION 



leads us but to the door of knowledge ; and 
there, we must either enter blindly or go 
our way bravely with our curiosity still 
unsatisfied. 



[28] 



Ill 

THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

*TPHE living spirit of the ages is made up 
^ of ideals more or less visionary in theif 
inception, more or less unattainable in their 
plenitude. And ill nations, as in indivi- 
duals, they are subject to the law of growth 
and decay — the law that governs the seed 
in the soil, the star-dust in the planetary 
system— as well as to the law of conser- 
vation. 

Like matter itself, an ideal is mutable, 
but indestructible. It does not die; it only 
Undergoes a change. It expresses itself in 
art and literature and religion only after 
it has attained a certain degree of common 
conception. An idealist is ahead of his 
time only in the sense that he is articulate. 
The same is true of a nation. For even 
primitive people, even effete races have a 
message for those above or below them. 
The heritage of the Ideal, however small 
can not be exhausted. 

That is why in periods of awakening, or 
of cataclysmic change, the light often comes 
[29] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

from unremembered and unexpected sour- 
ces — sources that were thought to be ex- 
hausted or barren. The ideals of Greece t 
of Rome, of the Orient, the ideals even of 
primitive man, come back to us, in the 
eternal cycle of the spirit, to leaven our 
own. They often surprise us in moments 
of depression or exaltation, in our silences, 
in our subliminal spells, even in our daily 
grind. 

Out of the vague, even vagrant concep- 
tions of the mind an ideal slowly evolves, 
assumes definite shape and form. Error- 
bound but truth-directed, we are constantly 
moving to a certain goal in its unfolding 
infinitudes. Its fiat is universal, despite 
its apparent failures. The grocer as well 
as the poet, at one time or another, must 
recognize and accept its circulating medium. 
Whether they squander it or save it or in- 
vest it — whether they profit by it or not — is 
another question. But they are idealists 
in that they are both dissatisfied with its 
purchasing power. We are all idealists in 
that we are ever discontented with the 
[30] 



THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

present state of the Ego and the World. 

It is among the poor and obscure, how- 
ever, that the ideal often finds its sincerest 
expression ; for those who make it their 
business often speculate in certain tangible 
concrete forms of it — reform formulas — 
that are neither useful in a general way nor 
attractive. The poor man, on the other 
hand, concerns not himself with reforms ; 
nor does he entertain such visions of a 
regenerated world as might obstruct the 
way to his immediate needs. His ideal, it 
is true, may consist in having a home in- 
stead of a slum-hole; in sending his chil- 
dren to school instead of the factory; in 
being free to work whenever and wherever 
he please, instead of being a slave to capital 
or to labor. It is nevertheless an ideal, 
which, although obviously material, has 
in it a spirituality that can revolutionnize 
the world. He sincerely desires to improve 
his own condition and to give the world 
better and healthier children. And this 
desire, though it be only partly realized in 
a lifetime, is the heritage of the ideal, which 
[31] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

he bequeaths to them. 

But the world seldom recognizes the 
spirituality in the material ideals of the 
poor. They are ridiculed by those who 
preach, but do not practice, the higher 
ethics. They are flouted, called base, 
worldly, sordid, by those professional ideal- 
ists of religion and literature and art. And 
yet, a loaf of bread can regenerate a soul ; 
a loaf of bread can precipitate a revolution. 
And by the law of reaction, materialism 
does become sordid, and the vaunted spirit- 
uality of its critics loses its vitality and 
attraction. Hence the epochal outbreaks 
of doubt, skepticism, heresy, revolt. For 
the man who is struggling for wealth and 
power or fame and glory, is no better and 
no worse, without a lofty ideal, than the 
man who is struggling for bread. The 
latter, in fact, is more deserving of respect, 
is more entitled to the consideration of the 
world. And the sooner he gets it, the 
better for the world. For the spirituality 
of his material ideals, now that he too has 
become a self-conscious Ego, is fast resolv- 
[32] 



THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

ing itself into a monstrosity of selfishness. 
He is no longer a poor working man ; he is 
a man of the working poor, who refuses to 
be poor for ever and refuses morever to 
work. He is a menace to-day. He will 
become a scourge to-morrow. No Labor 
Union can guide him; no Government can 
deter him. He is a fatality. Spiritually 
deformed himself, he comes, paradoxical 
as it may seem, to restore the world to its 
spiritual ideals. The religion that was 
given him as a consolation, he rejects; the 
faith that was perverted to keep him in 
bondage, to reconcile him to his gilded 
fetters, he renounces forever. But he will 
swing back with his masters from the 
height of a bloody crisis to the highest 
ideal — to a spirituality that is the common 
heritage and the cherished treasure of the 
rich and the poor. For a chastening pro- 
cess leaves its mark even upon our daily 
grind. It may take away our daily bread, 
but not the stuff of which our daily bread 
is made. 

Indeed, the spiritual springs from a ma- 
133] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

terialism intensified, sublimated. It is in- 
herent in the material ; and it should 
inform and illumine and beautify it. True, 
there is scarcely any evidence of this in 
the working man of to-day. But his spir- 
ituality, which is thought to be dead, is 
only dormant. And sometimes it betrays 
itself in a grotesque, spiritual somnambu- 
lism. For the working man still goes to 
church, despite the atheism, expressed or 
implied, of the two principal agents of his 
misery — the labor leader and the capitalist. 
The one in theory, the other in practice are 
responsible for his spiritual deformity. His 
leader tells him not to bother, not to worry 
about his soul; he even doubts its exist- 
ence. And the capitalist, by his conduct 
in business and out of business, confirms, 
gives additional force to the labor leader's 
advice. 

For what proof have we, it is often 
asked nowadays, of the existence of the 
soul and of the necessity, in consequence, 
of a soul-ideal? I go neither to metaphy- 
sics nor to spiritualism for an answer. To 
[34] 



THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

those who deny its existence, who make 
light of the innate divine flame in man, 
who can not see anything outside of mat- 
ter, or anything but matter in matter, to 
these materialists I offer the perfume of 
the rose, the light of the sun, the emanation 
of a firefly, the aura of a planet, to say 
nothing of the human understanding. Are 
these material? Do they, to go back to 
fundamentals in physics, occupy the same 
space with the objects from which they 
emanate? 

The room in w r hich I write, to take a 
simple example, becomes dark after sunset. 
It is not, you will concede, a vacuum. It 
is filled with air. But I turn a switch in 
the wall and the electric bulbs fill it also 
with light. The two substances, light and 
air, occupy the same, space simultaneously. 
Now, if light were matter, it would have 
a specific gravity; and this specific gravity, 
were it heavier than that of the air, would 
chase it out of the room. In which case, 
I could not continue to write — I would cease 
forthwith to exist. And what is true of 
[35] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

the light in my room, is true of the perfume 
of the rose, which hovers around it with 
the air it breathes and the sunshine it 
drinks. It is true, in fact, of the whole 
universe. For the air and the sunshine 
and the imponderable, intangible ether all 
occupy simultaneously the same space. 
How can our simple rule in physics explain 
this? 

Or, to come to man, how can your 
material philosophy explain that quality in 
personality which is called magnetism, 
which I prefer to call spirituality? By 
chemistry, by the principle of attraction and 
repulsion in cells or an organic structure 
of cells? But the person that repels us 
outwardly, physically, sometimes attracts 
us by a something he has within — an em- 
anation akin to the light of the sun and 
the perfume of the rose. What is it? In- 
tellect, intelligence, emotions, social and 
eductional accomplishments ? These are 
not always attractive. Intellect, on the 
contrary, might even be repulsive. Intel- 
ligence is not the heritage of man alone: 
[36] 



THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

the dutfib beasts have a sagacity that some- 
times excells our own. And the art of the 
bird building his nest and the bees making 
their honey-comb, can not be surpassed by 
the art of man. What is that mysterious, 
elusive quality then? Social accomplish- 
ments, charm? These may be rendered 
repulsive by selfishness, conceit, — by an in- 
flated, assertive, aggressive Ego. 

What is it, my dear Materialist, that 
draws you in your unconsciousness to me? 
I heard you once in Madison Square ex- 
pounding wholesale the negations of the 
day ; I saw you afterwards feeding the 
birds in the park. And I see you every 
clay, though your name is not trumpeted 
in the daily press, giving of your mite to 
charity. There must be a flaw somewhere 
in your material philosophy. For if you 
are in yourself a sort of detached cosmos, 
why take the trouble to establish these little 
attachments between you and the outside 
world ? 

I think I understand you, forgive the 
boast, better than you understand your- 
[371 



THE PATH OF VISION 

self. The human personality, you tell me, 
is a bundle of intellections and emotions. 
Granted. But this is true, you will con- 
cede, of both primitive and civilized man. 
And some primitive men, you will also 
concede, I hope, are more attractive to us 
than the most developed specimen of civili- 
zation. I offer you this explanation, there- 
fore, which you may accept or reject as 
you list. Your bundle of intellections and 
emotions, — your intelligence, your highly 
developed mind, — your passion for truth 
and justice, — these are cold and chilling and 
unf ructifying, if they are not illumined and 
warmed by that innate, inherent flame, 
which is as evident at times in primitive 
man as well as in you and me. This innate 
light is the spirituality which is manifest in 
lesser or greater degree in individuals as 
in nations, according to the recognition it 
receives, — according to the ideal of it that 
is cheriched and upheld. 

And this, I maintain, is the highest ideal 
of an individual or a nation. Complete 
victory in the struggle to attain it, is not 
[38] 



THE HIGHEST IDEAL 

often attained. But no defeat is richer in 
new possibilities than this of the spirit 
fighting for the spiritual ideal. And 
although no complete victory is often 
attained, socially conceived, materially 
considered, there is no such thing in 
it as complete failure. By a happy dispen- 
sation, every one is an object of comfort 
or of envy to his fellow men. No one is 
ever low enough, however baldly material 
he might be, or high enough, however spir- 
itual he might become, to be alone. The 
ideal itself saves us from this dreary dis- 
tinction. For we all find some one below 
us or above us — in most cases below and 
above us — to afford us a satisfaction and an 
incentive — to make the arduous ascent a 
pleasant jaunt. If the working man and 
the labor leader, the capitalist and the 
politician all recognized this truth and 
espoused the ideal it connotes, the social 
and industrial problems of the times would 
not seem so hopelessly insoluble, without 
general strikes and revolutions. For legis- 
lation alone is, after all, only a form of 
[39] 



THE PATH OF VISION 



compulsion. And a man without a spiritual 
ideal will obey the law when he can't help 
it and break it when he can. 



[40] 



IV 

MINDS AND MONOMINDS 

WHEN learning was monopolized by 
the monks in the Middle Ages, people 
specialized only in warfare and statecraft. 
And even these were not altogether free 
from the scholastic influence. Gradually, 
however, as the monopoly was broken, the 
guilds came into existence. And the crafts, 
aided by the printing press, developed and 
flourished. Even then, the educated man, 
whether he was a tailor or a monk, a states- 
man or a cobbler, did not confine himself, 
in his pursuit of knowledge, to any one 
particular subject. Vocationalism w r as a 
centre that lighted and included many 
avocations. 

This is still true of the Orient, where a 
tent-maker, for instance, might be a poet ; 
a distiller of perfumes would be an au- 
thority on astronomy perhaps or jurispru- 
dence; a professional singer, though he be 
of the slave cast, as in the Abbaside dy- 
nasty, often composes his own lyrics and 
masters one or more of the crafts as 
[41} 



THE PATH OF VISION 

weaving or dying; and that multi-minded 
personage, the Father of the Community, 
who cures the diseases of the body and the 
soul and administers justice, — who is a 
good priest, a competent physician and an 
upright judge, as the occasion requires, — 
is by no means extinct. 

In Europe, though instances of men of 
genius practicing one or more of the crafts 
or the sciences, do not abound as in the 
Orient, Michael Angelo and Benvenuto 
Cellini were the archtypes of many lesser 
luminaries who combined two or more of 
the arts and could discourse entertainingly, 
if not intellectually, on theology or alchemy 
orMachiavellism. The sculptor, in other 
words, was not merely a worker in stone or 
marble, a master only of lines and curves ; 
the poet often became a statesman; the 
painter could detach himself from his can- 
vas to study mathematics. And there are in- 
stances of musicians as authors and mas- 
ters, moreover, of a literary style. 

People were avid of knowledge in those 
days ; more, indeed, for the pleasure it gave 
[42] 



MINDS AND MONOMIXDS 

than the material benefits it afforded. 
Specialization was not known, — was not, at 
least, the dominating purpose of life. The 
tendency, the aim of all education was to 
produce well-rounded intellects, pleasing 
personalities, cultured individuals that 
could be at ease in any drawing room, at 
court, in the studios, the ateliers and the 
shops. An educated man was, indeed, a 
man of accomplishments— of circumam- 
bient intelligence. He had a general pass 
at least to the treasure house of knowledge ; 
and he continued, unlike the university 
graduate of to-day, to make use of it, to 
enjoy its many priveleges, even though his 
calling were of the humblest and most 
prosaic. An excursion into the world of 
knowledge, under the exclusive manage- 
ment of men of genius, independent of the 
schools and universities,, was, indeed, an 
uncommon joy. 

For those whose business it was to reach 
the hidden springs of knowledge, no sub- 
ject, natural or supernatural, human or 
divine, was ever too great or too small, too 
[43] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

distant or too near. They were at home in 
the universe. Theirs was indeed a circum- 
ambient intellect. But this quality of the 
mind, in its colossal form, is a phenomenon 
in modern history. It appeared in England 
in the sixteenth century and on the conti- 
nent in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It 
found its greatest exponents in Shake- 
speare, in Carlyle. in Voltaire and Goethe, 
in Hugo and Balzac. 

With the average man of talent, however, 
a circumambient intellect too soon evap- 
orates or crystallizes, resolving itself into 
its initial form, or its actual size, — thinning, 
in other words, into nothing, or settling 
down to a point. I have mentiond the ex- 
ceptions. But even in Voltaire and Goethe, 
how many breaks and how many rusty 
links do we find in the golden circle of each. 
And how often, when they can not run or 
walk erect, do they seem to us as shuffling, 
limping, chicaning levites in their eagerness 
to maintain their reputation as the master 
builders of the Circumambient System of 
human knowledge? The buckramed man- 
[44] 



MINDS AND MO NO MINDS 

tiers of the German — Carlyle's fanfarott* 
ades of idolatry to the contrary — and the 
astute Jesuitism of the Frenchman, while 
betraying the human frailty in genius, have 
often saved their intellects from spreading 
into nothingness or settling down to a 
point. That they refused to specialize, 
however, was their supreme virtue. 

But with the development of the sciences, 
intellectual circumambulating became a 
thing of the past. Hugo wrote its epitaph. 
Now specializing is the vogue, the dom- 
inating purpose of life, the supreme virtue. 
It is indeed the chief characteristic of out 
civilization. It has its conveniences, to be 
sure, and its rewards. A specialist gets 
somwhere, though it be no further than his 
kitchen or his cellar. And we do not have 
to tarry and toil to understand the one-sided 
man. We waste no time in trying to get a 
side or a back view, much less an inner 
view of our master Monomind. About 
face ! for our benefit, and we either go our 
way or stay. 

No, we no longer have time for excur- 
' [451 



THE PATH OF VISION 

-ions; nor have we patience with the idea 
of even thinking out for ourselves a pleas- 
ure-giving jaunt. To accomplish things 
in a material way, to succeed, is the dom- 
inating passion of the age. And there is 
no success, the specialists say, outside of 
a bee line to your goal. And a bee line, 
we say, does not too often require a su- 
perfluity of mind — a bee-mind is sufficient. 
But is there no truth in pragmatism? 
Is the practical philosopher to be wholly 
ignored, even when his cynicism, undis- 
guised, is held in check? Often his forth- 
rightness has a seductive air. If we want 
to be decisive, positive, aggressive in our 
views, we must not ever look, we are told, 
at both sides of a question. If you want 
to be an organizer, a master of men, you 
must be a one-sided, single-minded fanatic. 
For once you are accessible to evidence, 
once you are open to reason, you are lost. 
The fanatics, the monominds, are the great 
successes of the world. And be sure to 
have spunk enough to rise and keep going, 
when, in vour blinkers, you stumble or 
[46] 



MINDS AND MONOMINDS 

digress. And whatever you do, avoid the 
futilities of knowledge, the superfluities of 
culture. 

This is good advice, no doubt, to a 
plumber, a grocer, or a politician. But is 
there any truth in it to a man of intellectual 
and spiritual aspirations? A negation, to 
echo, Carlyle, never established a govern- 
ment ; indifference never founded a reli- 
gion. Only a well-rounded intellect, a 
spirit nourished in the eternal sources of 
intelligence and culture, of justice and wis- 
dom, is a safeguard against both indif- 
ference and skepticism. 

But have we to-day such well-rounded 
intellects, such finished personalities, where 
the mind and the soul are equally devel- 
oped, where a sheer joy in knowledge is 
sought and held out as the highest and 
noblest of all attainments? We have now- 
adays what might be called, either a hot- 
house intellect endowed with an adamant 
will, or a naturally powerful intellect 
debased by a vulgar soul. There are strong 
minds wrapt in a limited, dried-up con- 
[47] 



the path of vision 

Sciousness, or a clear, healthy conscious- 
ness harnessed in inherited prejudices or 
acquired preconceptions. And everywhere 
is a dislike, a contempt for change. The 
ruts of life are congested : the highways are 
almost vacant. And seldom do we, even 
in a life-time, yield to the impulse that 
calls us out of the ruts. Safety first, is 
a false slogan. It should be, Success first, 
Otherwise, we would cease anon to be 
strap-hangers and commuters, mere five- 
cent coupons for the Corporation of Prag- 
matism. Indeed, we would straightaway 
change our habit of mind. We would 
begin to have a mind. 

But there is a training of the will against 
such a change, to say nothing of the inter- 
ests involved. And that is why, I think, 
the human will nowadays is more developed 
than it was in the past. That is why, too, 
it is often mistaken for power. Why, a 
man who can burrow a rut in the curb be- 
tween his home and his office, between his 
faith and his interest, must surely be en- 
dowed with the will to conquer. Presumably 
[48] 



MINDS AND MONOMINDS 

so. But an intractable will is not even the 
sign or proof of better intellectual metal ; 
gold is more ductile than iron. 



149] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

V 

TOURING AXD COMMUTING 

THE world of knowledge is honey- 
combed nowadays with railroads under 
private control. We no longer have, as 
in the past., a monopoly of transportation 
and communication; — not even a Tourist - 
Agent who will assume the responsibility 
of a personally conducted tour on all the 
lines, except it be the Daily Press. And 
chen, you are likely to lose your baggage 
and find yourself stranded in the wilder- 
ness of belief. You begin to doubt, not 
only the vaunted omniscience of your 
Guide, but even yourself. 

The monks of the Middle Ages, though 
their system of transportation was no: 
based on dividends or profit-sharing 
schemes, were good conductors, excellent 
engineers, faithful and experienced guides. 
The incidents of the journey were not very 
agreeable, but accidents were scarce. A 
traveller risked little or nothing bv entrust- 
[50] 



TOURING AND COMMUTING 

ing himself to the monks ; his body and his 
soul were well served, though not with 
equal consideration ; and his baggage, after 
a thorough examination, of course, was 
checked and very carefully handled. More- 
over, they agreed to let him stop as long 
as he wished at every stage of the journey, 
provided he did not overpraise the Line 
and thereby reduce its solid comforts. And 
this, the most attractive feature of their 
Programme, they guaranteed to bring him 
back to the Starting Point. 

The only condition the monks imposed 
upon their passengers, was silence. No 
criticisms, no commendations, no sugges- 
tions. Not even such incidents as stopping 
on the way to burn a conductor alive for 
taking another course than that prescribed 
in the Schedule, was even to be questioned. 
Such outside interference was banned un- 
der penalty of a similar death. But the 
people, on the whole, were satisfied with 
the System, which worked tolerably well 
for a century or more ; although it was 
whispered, now and then, at the various 
[51] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

stages of the Journey that, the fire of the 
Engine having been exhausted, a few of 
the passengers, who had the temerity to 
comment upon one of the untoward inci- 
dents of burning, were themselves utilized 
as fuel. 

These whispers spread, slowly acquired 
a cumulative force, and became in the 
course of time a voice, a cry, an echoing 
and re-echoing protest. For the monks 
of the Middle Ages were human. They 
abused their monopoly of power. And 
some of the passengers themselves, the 
more enterprising who did not embark 
upon the Journey solely for pleasure, had 
already surveyed certain lands, mapped 
out a road of their own, and became in 
time experienced and reliable Tourist- 
Agents. The novelty of a personally con- 
ducted Tour had its appeal. It became 
the vogue. 

The monks, therefore, soon lost the 

monopoly. And the Luther and Calvin 

Lines, the Bruno and Galileo Systems, the 

Erasmuses', the Schoolmen's, the Knox- 

[52] 



TOURING AND COMMUTING 

Road Limited, the Swedenborg Rapid 
Transit of the Universe, even the Abu'l- 
Ala Caravans in the Near East, — all en- 
joyed a prosperity that made their div- 
idends attractive for a season. But these 
privately-owned Lines, these personally 
conducted Tours, continued to increase till 
it was no longer safe to travel on any of 
them, because each one went in a different 
direction and had no connection at all with 
the others. The transfer system was not 
known in those days. And the result was 
that, if you wanted to make a tour of the 
world, you would be left high and dry in 
some wilderness, or stranded in some port, 
if you did not come back to your starting 
point as often as you had to make a change. 
Hence the disappointment and dissatis- 
faction of the public, who soon began to 
realize and appreciate again the advantages 
of the monks' Central and Circumabient 
System. But we are progressing — we can 
not go back to the monks, it was urged by 
some; the commuting habit, its virtues 
and attractions, were insisted upon by 
[B3] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

others. But no one seemed to think of 
a transfer system, or imagine the possibil- 
ity of a fusion of interests, or even dared 
to suggest the construction of shuttles be- 
tween certain Lines. The confusion soon 
developed to anarchy and chaos. Private- 
ownership of the roads of knowledge and 
faith bcame a public nuisance. But how- 
was the nuisance to be abated? By going 
back to the monks. Their circumambient 
system of roads, was partly destroyed, 
partly merged in the private Lines ; and 
it was not possible to reconstruct or redeem 
even a narrow gauge to the nearest junc- 
tion of skepticism and doubt. 

In fact, though the people did not cease 
to travel, to commute rather, the heads of 
the private corporations w T ere discredited. 
People began to lose faith in the Inform- 
ation Bureau ; tickets were destroyed ; time- 
tables were burned ; and skepticism became 
the fashion of the day. And like all 
fashions, it was soon t? become the meau? 
of another monopoly. 

Hence the Voltaires, the Goethes, the 
[54] 



TOURING AND COMMUTING 

Tom Paines, the Encyclopedists, who re- 
vived the World-Tour of the monks, newly 
mapped out, of course, without imposing 
any conditions or restrictions on the travel- 
ling public. It was a howling success, 
because the world was then, as in the days 
of the monks, of a single mind. Only that 
its mind was no longer prostrate, as it were, 
on the carpet of faith ; it was somersaulting 
on the trapeze of skepticism. 

The Voltaire Merry-Go-Round of the 
Universe, the Goethe System of Scenic 
Railways, the Encyclopedists* Federated 
Roads, even the Rousseau Witching Waves 
became so popular that the cynical and 
skeptical world was transformed into a 
veritable Lunar Park of the Mind. Come, 
shake up your thinking cells and your 
bones. A Pamphlet will get you through 
the gate. And then, slap-dash into the in- 
finity of negations, through the holy pre- 
cincts of the creeds, across the hunting 
grounds of the privileged aristocracy, 
down the narrow lanes of convention, over 
the mountains and plains of freedom to the 
[55] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

very heart of the radiant, universal Illusion. 
But these joy-rides were attended by many 
uncommonly horrible accidents. Thrones 
and altars were overturned to construct 
branch Lines and Shuttles; Kings and 
Queens and Excellencies were beheaded for 
being in the way; and even the Christ was 
run over by the Sanculotte Express, en- 
gineered by the Heberts and Marats. 

This continued for many years until the 
Circumambient System came under the 
control of a more responsible Board of 
Directors presided by such men as Hugo 
and Mazzini, Balzac and Dickens, Renan 
and Carlyle. So an era of peace and pros- 
perity fallowed, which was the mother of 
many private fortunes. In fact, the giant 
Corporation was gradually overshadowed 
and overpowered by limited private Lines, 
in which the schools, the universities and 
the daily press invested much of their 
capital stock. 

Now the honorable habit of commuting 
is resumed; and joy-riding, not through the 
infinity of negations, but far into the No- 
[56] 



TOURING AND COMMUTING 

where of indifference, has become again 
the vogue. Instead of patronizing, how- 
ever, the privately-owned Lines and en- 
trusting their precious life and time to the 
precariousness of the shuttle and transfer 
System, those who place safety above 
dividends, prefer to walk the while they 
clamor for public ownership of public en- 
terprises. Meanwhile, the rank of those 
who have their own "flivvers" is growing 
day by day. And the crying need of the 
times is an efficient Police Force to direct 
the Traffic. 



[57] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

VI 

GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD 

OUR ideals are the vehicles of our illu- 
sions; our illusions are the motor 
forces of our desires ; our desires are born 
of an innate, insatiable longing for the 
Beautiful, the Good, and the True, — for 
the superlatives, in other words, of what, 
according to our own light, is the truth ; 
and our own light, that undying spiritual 
flame in the temple of our being, has its 
eternal sources in the sun and soil, as in 
the schools and universities, and the arts 
and sciences of our time. 

That is why, from a pure amber flame 
in the past, when religion was the supreme 
dominating force in life, it has developed 
into a complex, many-colored, spasmodical- 
ly burning mass of inharmonies. The 
amber hue is seldom seen nowadays; a 
green ray filters through the smoke; a 
golden spark now and then illumines it, 
but only for a spell; the opalescent rays 
[58] 



GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD 

fitfully rise and swell only to be eclipsed 
by the blaze of reddish smoke, akin to the 
scientist's nebular beginning — the reddish 
smoke of the chaos of our time. 

And why this chaos ? The innate eternal 
flame of the soul is not extinguished in 
man — his spirituality is not dead. But 
while in the past it was fed by one stoker, 
so to speak, it is to-day fed by a hundred, 
a thousand stokers, indifferent and indis- 
criminate, who gather their fuel at random 
in forests young and old, in rocky copses, 
in distant bogs. Hence the smoking, corus- 
cating, crepitating, fitfully glowing flame. 
There are many wet logs and green logs 
in the fire ; much brushwood too and peat ; 
and the ash-heap of the ages, which never 
can be entirely removed. 

But the fire is not extinguished, will not 
be extinguished, can not be extinguished. 
Gradually the wet and green logs, the 
brushwood, the peat will all be consumed, 
and the amber golden flame will become 
purer, steadier, more enduring and more 
beautiful than ever. This is my under- 
[59] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

standing of the spiritual and intellectual 
chaos of our time. The true essence of 
the flame is still there ; the eternal sources 
of it are still there ; and the means of com- 
munication are by no means cut off. We 
still have stokers, although they are not 
called prophets and priests, who go direct 
to the sun and soil for their fuel. They can 
not, to he sure, exclude, like the prophets 
of old, the wet and green logs from the 
fire. In a democratic state and a universal 
state of education, every one has the right 
to bring his little armful to the pile; but 
only the good wood in the end will prevail, 
will dominate with its pure glow and 
warmth, with its steady flame, the burning 
mass. 

To drop the metaphor, the truth, which 
rests on the eternal verities of existence, 
will always prevail. Like the seasons of 
the year, like history, truth also repeats 
itself. But w r e seldom recognize it, when 
great poets or true artists — the prophets 
and the priests of our day — present it to us 
in garments spick and span, following the 
[60] 



GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD 

fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, 
the turn and temper of its mind. 

By a trick of the pen or the brush we are 
cozened into old beliefs; and lest we see 
through the diapheneities of our new 
deities, we are forced to put on the smoked 
glasses of culture, assume a conventional 
pose, scientific or artistic, and worship at 
a distance sufficiently safe for our vanities 
and illusions. 

But when a man of uncommon courage, 
insight and zeal raises a little altar of his 
own to the old fashioned truths and the old 
fashioned virtues, — when he comes, to go 
back to my metaphor, with fuel for our 
innate fire direct from the sun and soil, — 
he is banned from the temple of the elect, 
denounced as a reactionary or, what is 
worse, poo-poohed as a high-brow. Yes, 
the builder nowadays, paradoxical as it 
may seem, is looked upon as a destroyer. 
But the iconoclast of the past is incarnate 
in the devote worshipper of the present. 
This, the little red-eyed iconoclasts of the 
times, can not see. 

[61] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

Are we not solving the great Riddle, 
these loud-lunged children of spiritual 
poverty and squalor, of intellectual anarchy 
and chaos, cry out. Are we not advancing 
in the way of new discoveries, we the apos- 
tles of the New Freedom, the forerunners 
of the New Era? Granted that you are, 
my emancipated Brothers. But dare you 
approach your new ideals, new truths, new 
virtues, and divest them of their trappings 
and their masks? Even the most radical 
among you, the Bolsheviki of the soul, the 
Anti-Christs, when they stand on their 
heads, are hut a crude symbol of the Cross 
reversed. 

And the ideals of your superman, as 
conceived by their Teuton protagonist, not 
as they are poetized by his interpreters and 
parroters, find their highest and noblest 
expression in self-sacrifice. The old fash- 
ioned virtue again. 

Yes, indeed ; even Nietzsche who thought 

he had murdered Christianity, fled to the 

forest and brought back a few good logs 

for the inner fire. Even Nietzsche was 

[62] 



GREEN LOGS AND BRUSHWOOD 

made the sport of his own "blond beast" 
and sent back to the foot of the cross — a 
caricature of the Christ. 



[6$] 



THE PATH OF VISION 
VII 

A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 

n^HROUGH her own medium, Nature's 
-*• appeal is not always adequate. Her 
language is not understood alike by the 
woodman and the poet. Her secret is often 
hidden under her articulate charm); and she 
unveils only to the elect of the soul and 
mind. That is why we often get more of 
her through the medium of the interpreter, 
who pursues his task with the patience and 
faithfulness of a devotee. But even these 
translations, whether they be literal or 
poetic, have a varying degree of merit 
and interest. John Burroughs, for in- 
stance, is an excellent guide; but Thoreau, 
who knows as well the winding paths, the 
forest trails, the secret nooks and hidden 
mysteries, can also entertain us with a 
song. Even in the idealization of Nature, 
we have such a variety as ranges from the 
mirage-like glamor of Turner to the rhyth- 
mic delicacies of Corot to the apocalyptic 
[64] 



A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 

grandeur of Van Gogh. 

But the translator, whether a painter or 
a maker of manuels or of song, loses or 
gains in the appeal according to the indi- 
viduality he infuses into his work. The 
human touch is unfailing no matter how 
slight or how strong. It can hold you 
spellbound before a fern or send you 
scampering through the fields, chasing a 
butterfly or a will-o'-the-wisp. For Nature, 
like man, will tyrannize when she can. 
And when the translator is conquered by 
her, he loses the quality that makes his art 
supreme. He becomes a dryasdust master 
of definitions and classifications. For to 
be impersonal as the elements, is unhuman, 
unnatural. One may be sublime, as Emer- 
son ; but it is an arid sublimity void of the 
one great element of genius — passion. 

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera 
can do that. To get the spirit of Nature ? 
A woodman or a shepherd can follow the 
trail of the whistling wind to hoarded 
sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret 
Nature and inform it with a human per- 
[65] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

sonality that rises above it, invokes the 
divine in it, is the work of genius. And 
this can only be done through the magnify- 
ing and intensifying process. Even the 
eye of the soul can not always see the 
subtleties that conceal a world of beauty 
and charm. So the medium of genius, 
which stands between us and Nature, is 
necessarily complex, and is endowed more- 
over with an intense passion. Every note 
and echo, every line and shade, no matter 
how minute and distant, is transfigured 
through it, is intensified, magnified for our 
common perception. 

Passing through a glade, I hear the flit- 
ting notes of a bird or smell the elusive 
aroma concealed in the brush. The poet 
sits there and, with infinite patience, waits 
and waits, till he catches the one and iden- 
tifies the other. The result would be a 
lyric perhaps, in which both are so intense- 
ly reproduced that they are unmistakable. 
Inversely, and by the same token, there is 
good reason for magnifying certain situa- 
tions in literature, on a canvas, or on the 
[66] 



A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 

stage in spectacular productions. 

Consider, for instance, a simoom in 
the desert. One feels the intensity and 
magnitude of even the slightest gust of 
the sand storm in the vast and trackless 
waste. There is no need there for mag- 
nification. The boundless sea of sands is 
a sufficient background. But on the stage 
or on a canvas, with a limited area and an 
artificial background, how can such a 
picture be produced with effect unless its 
elemental features are magnified, intensi- 
fied? If a traveller, who happens to be in 
the audience, objects that the simoom 
seldom reaches such brobdingnagian pro- 
portions, the reply is, Bring to play in this 
circumscribed space in the open desert a 
compressed simoom, so to speak, and you 
will have an intensity of effect that can 
hardly be represented on the stage or on 
a canvas. 

The same thing might be said of a poem 

in which all the reactions of Nature are 

translated through the complex medium of 

the senses as well as the soul. Her voice, 

[67] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

her form, her lights and shades, the very 
spirit of her whole being breathes and 
sings in the lines of a Wordsworth or a 
Shelly. At this height, the painter and 
the poet are one; or the musician brings 
them together, is the link between them. 
For a poem may not only contain a picture, 
or a picture, a poem, but both are often 
vibrant with the rythmic harmony, even 
the melody of song. 

This brings us to the tone-poem, of 
which so much has been written, and little 
understood. What is a tone-poem? I 
have heard many such, no doubt; and I 
have read somewhat of the musical critic's 
abstruseness on the subject. But not until 
I stood one day before a mountain stream, 
was the matter clear in my mind. The 
rolling waters, the silvery music, the foam- 
ing cascades — here is Nature's Footnote, 
her own simple interpretation of a tone- 
poem. It is more than that, indeed. It is 
her hornbook of the arts, a symbol of the 
holy trinity of genius — Music and Painting 
and Poetry. 

[08] 



A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 

In poetry, however, this treble phase is 
often inadequately expressed. Only a 
trained ear can make out its music, can 
catch the rhythmic beauty of its harmonies ; 
and only a trained eye can appreciate the 
word-painting. For most people, especially 
in this age of free verse and realism, read 
in poetry only the idea it conveys, the sent- 
iment it shrines or burlesques, or the bare 
facts it gathers and disseminates. But in 
music is the temple of the trinity of Art 
for those who can see as well as hear; in 
painting too, for those who can read as 
well as see. 

Indeed, the three arts are as associated 
with each other, as related to each other 
as the tripple phenomenon of a mountain 
stream. For in its cascade-bedecked cur- 
rents, breaking into silver spray, singing 
themselves into cerulean ecstasies, pausing 
in hollows under daffiodiled banks, flowing 
in transparent lucid stanzas over the moss- 
carpeted rocks, we have the sonata, the 
poem and the picture combined. 

And never, as I said, could I fathom the 
[691 



THE PATH OF VISION 

musical critic's dogmatism and esoteric 
sidelights thereon, until I beheld this 
striking and telling symbol of a tone-poem. 
I shut my eyes and enjoy the music; I open 
them and enjoy the music and the picture. 
I behold the waters in their coruscating 
splendor ; I hear them sing as they roll on, 
meandering to the sea ; and with the soul's 
surgings of color and shade, intensified 
through my own interpreting medium, I 
have the poem, the picture, the song — all 
in one masterpiece. 

A tone poem, therefore, is that which 
appeals to the ear and the eye as well as 
to the eye of the soul. It is the living, 
moving, singing incarnation of Poetry, 
Painting and Music. I offer this, a foot- 
note by Nature, to the esteemed critic's 
learning. And it is devoid, it will be ob- 
served, of the ruffles and flounces of 
criticism. 

The holy trinity of Art symbolized in a 

mountain stream. For if we can not see 

a picture in a fine piece of music or hear 

the strains of a distant song in a picture, — 

[70] 



A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE 

if we can not drink of the beauty of both 
with the eye as well as the ear, — we had 
better seek entertainment in a picture 
gallery, where hang many a visible palpable 
specimen of colors rioting in quadrangles 
of gilded mouldings,,, of colors clamoring 
for recognition in the little square horizons 
of the artist's soul. 



[71] 



THE PATH OF VISION* 
VIII 

THE MOTHER OF COMMON SEXSE 

OXCE knew a dreamer of golden 
-*• dreams. He was young, handsome, 
robust and impecunious; and he was be- 
trothed to that fickle, elusive, flirtatious 
and fascinating creature, Fame. He nursed 
his genius in a little studio for sevral years, 
setting up on a pedestal near his typewriter 
an image of his Beloved, whom he secretly 
worshipped and openly denounced. He 
covered her with flowers of his dream at 
night, and pretended in the open day to 
be impervious to her wiles and charms. 
They coquetted and flirted and quarrelled 
for a couple of years, and were, indeed, 
periodically estranged. Once he turned her 
away from his door, because she doubted 
the value of the dowry he offered her. A 
trinket, she called it, a brummagem! 

But who shall evaluate genius? Who, 
but Genius, is competent to say whether or 
not it is a fitting dowry for that elusive 

[72] 



THE MOTHER OF COMMON SENSE 

and fickle Mistress? And though it had 
stood the test-fire of sacrifice, who is qual- 
ified to pronounce it genuine or false? My 
friend answered these questions to his own 
satisfaction and w T ent one day to the 
market-place. But the market-men would 
not listen, would not be detained. The 
jewellers of art shook their heads ; the 
merciers and the milliners of literature 
smiled; the grocers were amused; the an- 
tiquarians were annoyed. And everywhere 
the little terracotta gods of the bazaar, like 
old Buddha himself, gazed eternally upon 
their navels. 

The dreamer of golden dreams returned 
to his studio and straightway burned the 
image of his Beloved. And he pinned on 
the wall, above his typewriter, the follow- 
ing: I lost my faith one morning in the 
market-place and found it the following 
day in a cash register. 

Even the cash register, as far as he was 

concerned, would not disclose the secret of 

the transmutation. Although he invoked 

it every day for several months, tried to 

[731 



THE PATH OF VISION 

bribe it with attractive objects from the 
toy-shop of Cleverness, shook before it the 
ivory rattle of Flippancy, there was no re- 
sponse, — not the least sign of favor. To 
him it seemed locked and sealed forever 
and ever. But one of the little imp-gods 
that guarded it, once grinned. Which de- 
cided my friend. H shook the dust of the 
bazaar from his feet, the dust of the studio 
he shook from his soul, and hied him to the 
solitude of the hills. 

There I met him one day sitting under 
a tree near a running stream, still nursing, 
as I first supposed, his genius. He was 
still handsome, but neither robust, did he 
seem, nor impecunious. In fact, he had 
solved, he told me, the economic problem, 
and was, therefore, contemplating suicide. 

— But this damned stream is not deep 
enough anywhere. And I have not the 
courage to hang myself or put a bullet 
through my brain. Brain? I don't think 
I have any left. I'm all nerves, nerves — 
and white corpuscles. I can't even bear 
the sight of flowers. And the chatter of 
[74] 



THE MOTHER OF COMMON SENSE 

these birds is irritating, exasperating, mad- 
dening. What brought you here? On a 
hike? I wish I could go with you. But 
my legs can't carry me anywhere beyond 
my own hell. The solitude of the hills is 
a hollow mockery — the healing influence of 
the forest, a fake, a sham — worse than a 

doctor's prescription . . And this 

damned stream is not deep enough any- 
where. 

He got up coughing, a deep, dry, racking 
cough, which brought the livid glow to his 
cheeks; and turning his back to me, he 
waved his hand — a silent farewell. I was, 
indeed, sorry, but there was nothing to be 
done. He was beyond the reach of any 
human solace. I was certain, however, 
that he had not the courage, even if the 
stream was deep enough anywhere. But 
the spark of genius was not extinguished 
in him. It scintellated in his eyes, and 
seemed to feed on the tuberculosis germs 
in his lungs. I wondered which will sur- 
vive the other, or whether he himself would 
survive both. 

[75] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

Two years later — miracle of miracles ! — 
I met him again in New York — on a sub- 
way train. He recognized me first, hailed 
me with an exclamation and a slap of the 
hand. It was the hand of a strong, robust 
and cheerful being. I confess I would 
never have recognized him as the Timon of 
the hills I once met. My first feeling, after 
the delectable surprise, w r as one of irre- 
sistible curiosity. How did he do it? 
How, in the eternal vicissitude of fate and 
genius, did he become reconciled? And 
a strap-hanger to boot! He looked pros- 
perous, to be sure; but there was in his 
face and manner an unmistakable something 
which the city dwellers acquire — a rigidity 
of expression which marks their pauses 
and moments of quiescence. They forget, 
and seem of a sudden to remember, that 
they are parts, more or less important, of 
a gigantic machine. My friend seemed 
eager nevertheless to tell me how he recov- 
ered his health and his faith in life. 

We walked out of the Subway as hilarious 
as children coming out of school, and went 
[76] 



THE MOTHER "OF COMMON SENSE 

to a cafe of his choice. The head-waiter 
saluted him smiling ; the waiters were eager 
to serve him. But he chose his table with 
the knowingness and ease of a habitue, 
and ordered the drinks. 

"I suppose/' he said, as he laid down 
his glass, "y° u are wondering how it came 
about. I have made a discovery ; and what 
is best, I was the first to profit by it. A 
disease of the mind is responsible more or 
less for all our physical ills ; egotism is the 
most pernicious bacillus of the mind; and 
this bacillus feeds, not only on dreams, 
ambitions, illusions, but on the general 
unrest, the social chaos of the times. Is 
there a cure? There is indeed. At least 
for the individual. Starve the bacillus 
first. Find you an anchor, a job. And 
don't forget, the nearest port in a storm. 
I found mine in a newspaper office, where 
I am now writing editorials for the en- 
lightenment and guidance of mankind. My 
ego? It is dead as far as mankind and 1 
are concerned. But my friends in the office 
denv that it is ; and what is more strange, 
[77] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

it's even relishable, they say, pickled as it is 
in anonymity. Yes, the work is interesting, 
though sometimes annoying and often am- 
using — to myself* An editorial writer is 
the Keeper, you might say, of the People's 
Conscience. And his work, from day to 
day, is a picture gallery of his mind. The 
variety is infinite and bewildering even to 
himself. For if he goes through the gallery 
after a month or two of copy-making, he 
could scarcely distinguish one picture from 
another. And yet, they are all his own, 
made by his hand, after his very image! 
Anonymity, of course, is his salvation. It's 
very interesting, very amusing, indeed. 
And conducive, as you see, of health and 
cheerfulness. Let's have another drink." 

The succession aroused in him a ruminat- 
ing, reminiscing humor. And our little 
corner table, as soon as I mentioned the 
hills, became a confessional. 

"We are made or marred," he said, "more 

often marred by an excess of affection, 

which develops in us a querulous, petulent, 

supersensitive nature. If our relatives and 

[78] 



THE MOTHER OF COMMON SENSE 

friends would be a little indifferent or even 
resentful, it would fare better with us. My 
immediate surroundings in those mountain 
solitudes were absurdly Christian, to say 
the least. My mother, my sister, and my 
brother, with whom I lived, idolized me, 
idealized even my defects and idiosyncra- 
cies. Yes, I have been made a tyrant by 
my own people; and had I the courage, I 
might have become an assassin or done 
violence even to myself. That stream*' — 
this with a chuckle — "was not deep enough 
anywhere. 

"But I too— I invoke your kind consid- 
eration — I too have been tyrannized by a 
principle : tolerance has always been the 
despot of my conduct. Even freedom has 
its fetters. For while everything seemed 
to clash, while I continually found myself 
out of sorts with everybody around me, I 
had to suffer them to do as they pleased, 
because it was my principle always to do 
as I please. And how much we have to 
tolerate for a principle, and from it, when 
we are too conscientious to be modest and 
[79] 



THE fcATH OF VISION 

sane. Oh, the tortures I have suffered in 
those days in suffering those who shared 
my home and table to have their way. You 
must have thought me mad, when you saw 
me that day, or umbrageous to a degree of 
madness. But I was all nerves, believe 
me. And nothing seemed to sooth my 
aching nerves as breaking something. 

"And yet, when I threw a plate at the 
servant, because she came into the dining 
room in her sabots — -we had a French maid 
from the Midi who would not for the world 
forgo her wooden shoes — tuk, tuk, tuk 
on the wooden floor is maddening in the 
mountain silences — it was because that 
French slattern, who did as she pleased in 
her own little way, did not go the length 
of her desire and throw her sabots in my 
face. I think, I am certain, that a sabot 
on the head from that servant would have 
cured me of my disease. 

"For supersensitiveness is nothing but a 

disease produced by submission in your 

household and aggravated by fawning or 

by an excess of affection. Sincerity in 

[80] 



THE MOTHER OF COMMON SENSE 

either case did not help to extenuate their 
fault or mine. But my principle of tol- 
erance would exercise its sway again, and, 
instead of throwing plates or smashing an 
earthen pitcher in a dramatic rage before 
a cowed audience of lovers, I would find 
myself nibbling at my own soul, eating my 
very heart in unrighteous anger. My 
nerves, taught and overcharged, would 
twitch for hours at a stretch, and I could 
not for days as much as put two and two 
together. During which time I could see 
nothing but evil intentions and malign 
purposes around me. If my mother prayed 
at noon, she was doing so to annoy me; 
if my brother came to the table in his 
shirt-sleeves, he was doing so to see how 
much I could tolerate — how true I was to 
my principle; if my sister had her break- 
fast in her room, it was not, I imagined, 
from a delicate regard for the Tyrant of 
the Establishment, who insisted on the 
etiquette of the table, but with malice 
a-forethought. And so, the days tragically 
dragged and palled, until I adopted the 
[81] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

Trappist system. For a week or ten days 
at a time, I would go into silence, and all 
apparently would go well, not with me, 
however, but with my household. The re- 
pression accentuated my trouble, aggravated 
my disease. The asylum stared me in the 
face. But I saved myself, as you see. 
Indeed, only when I left my dear good 
people and put up again in the cold, hard 
solitude of the crowd in the city, where 
toleration is neither a principle nor an ar- 
ticle of faith, but simply a matter of neces- 
sity, was I cured of my querulous, petulent, 
acerbic, atrabilious, misanthropic abom- 
inations. And cured too of my egotism and 
all the illusions and all the vanities it 
engenders. The City hath its healing balm, 
my friend. " 

And he raised his glass. 

"To the Mother of Common Sense — the 
rest of her children don't count for much — 
to the great City." 



[82] 



IX 

THE QUESTION OF PONTIUS 
PILATE 

"'TPRUTH," says the philosopher, an- 
■*• swering Pilate's question, "is the 
unity of universal and subjective will." 
But who is to elucidate for the Pilates of 
our time the meaning of universal will? 
I once made a heroic attempt to unhusk 
the logic of Schopenhauer and to unravel 
the metaphysical skein of Hegel. But some- 
thing forbidding, even obnoxious, seemed 
to stand between me and my purpose. The 
husk of generalization was too thick, too 
hard, and, what is worse, too thorny. It 
was the exogenous growth, particularly the 
spinosity, of a purely subjective mind. The 
philosopher's ego, in other words, adum- 
brated the universal will. And in following 
it, we follow a shadow that aspires to 
Deity. 

It aspires, moreover, in conflict, not in 

harmony. To put it mildly and plainly, 

there often lurks a personal interest in the 

generalization of philosophers. It is often 

[83] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

too a personal grudge. For philosophers 
quarrel, not only with what they under- 
stand to be the universal will, but also with 
each other. Indeed, not infrequently, does 
the human heart cry out through their 
bulwarks of reason. To be sure, they 
quarrel not like the village crones or the 
town trollops ; but their panoply of logic 
is saturated with gall. And their hatreds, 
their jealousies, their prejudices, wearing 
the masks of speculation, seldom fail to 
recognize each other. 

But with their readers, the disguise in- 
variably succeeds. Thus we are often the 
dupes of an abstract theory stretched out 
to cover the personal prejudices and here- 
dities of the author. It is not ignorance 
which our philosopher is cudgeling, but a 
particular ignorant contemporary; not at 
error or prejudice does he aim his poisoned 
shafts, but at an erring and prejudiced 
colleague. 

We have a striking instance of this in 
Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of 
History, w T here Schopenhauer is disguised 
[84] 



THE QUESTION OF PONTIUS PILATE 

in one of the theories he tears to pieces; 
while Schopenhauer, in his Literary Es- 
says, clothes Hegel in transcendental rags, 
sets him up as a target, and proceeds to 
exercise upon him his dialectic skill. This, 
in the way of evolving a noble theory of 
life, or answering the query of Pilate. For 
the privilege of philosophers, enjoying the 
respect of the world, is such that they can 
only flay each other under the deluding 
assumption that they are flaying Error and 
Falsehood. Indeed, their generalizations 
often cover many a sore spot in their 
hearts. Envy, envy, thou Persephone of 
this lower world, even philosophers are 
counted atriong thy slaves. For instead of 
the truth, or as much as a taste of its 
kernel, we get the thorny husks of their 
egotism. And yet, they are the psychol- 
ogists and metaphysicians who have tried 
to approach the Creator in a scientific 
manner ! 

Even a popular Handbook on Mind 
Power, for instance, and How to Get It, 
I find more satisfactory. For in it are no 
[85] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

bamboozling generalities, no disguised per- 
sonal grievances, no attempt to elucidate 
the universal will or discover the truth of 
the universe. Instead of abstruse dissert- 
ations, we get a simple recipe of how to 
feed and develop the mind. And often, the 
practical method suggested makes the pur- 
suit a pleasant and sometimes profitable 
adventure. 

Indeed, those Manuels for the People 
are as wonderful and entertaining, even as 
transporting as the Movies. Mind and 
Will Training: What It Is and How It Is 
Done, Soul-Culture, Psychometry, Phre- 
nometry, Mental and Magnetic Healing: 
What They Are and How To Get Them 
In An Hour, — these are improvements, 
methinks, on the dissertations and lucubrat- 
ions of acerbic cynics and umbrageous 
philosophers. They take you into an en- 
chanted land, where no Pilate or shadow 
of a Pilate ever haunts the scene. 

And with a few directions you learn the 
whole business of miracles. Then sudden- 
ly, you leap out of your cribbed and 
[86] 



THE QUESTION OF PONTIUS PILATE 

cramped self, a full-fledged wizard, an 
extra-cosmic god, with no grudge against 
any one or any world, into the all-pervasive, 
all-absorbing, all-knowing. You become, 
indeed, as omnipotent and wonder-working 
as a hero or heroine of the Movies. Why 
then be but a walking protoplasm, why 
keep your soul in a vitalized cell, when a 
Manuel on Soul Culture: What It Is and 
How It Is Done can turn you into an 
exalted apotheosized ape? Apotheosis for 
a dollar! Nothing cheaper on or off the 
earth. With pincers of practical logic the 
wires that are held by Destiny are, not 
drawn, but neatly cut, and you are severed 
from the Tyrant forever. You become a 
free being, an infinite Mind, a divine Per- 
sonality. The detachment from the senses, 
or the protoplasmic definiteness, or the vi- 
talized cell they call the soul, is absolute; 
and you plunge thereupon clean into the 
Invisible, where you are certain to lose 
your tail. 

But if you are of those who sneer at the 
Manuels of Enchantment or scoff at the 
[87] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

generalities of disenchanted philosophers, 
and continue, like Pilate, to rub their hands 
and smile skeptically, may I not recom- 
mend to your distinguished consideration 
that Cometographer of the spirit-world, 
Henrik Ibsen? He it was who turned the 
pockets of the soul inside out and found 
in them only a bullet and a little cyanide 
of mercury. 

For the underlying idea of Ibsen's Art 
and Philosophy seems to be that one should 
conceive the beautiful and the true in this 
terrestrial existence and wait to realize 
them in another. Or, apply the bullet or 
the cyanide, if you can not wait. Sow in 
your soul the seeds of the ideal, which is 
one way of answering Pilate, and let death 
shield them from the frost of life. In other 
words, as soon as the ideal begins to germ- 
inate, in order to preserve it in its vigor 
and purity, hasten hence to some more 
friendly clime beyond the valleys of the 
moon. I do not think it would be far from 
the truth to picture those Ibsen souls as 
comets sweeping through this world to 
[88] 



THE QUESTION OF PONTIUS PILATE 

others far and unseen, leaving in the dis- 
turbed atmosphere behind them a sinister 
portent of coming disaster. That is why 
I call him the Comet ographer of the spirit- 
world. 

And thus, what are called results are only 
beginnings according to Plato, who an- 
swered Pilate by offering him the Magic 
Carpet of Dreamjs. Which I, for one, 
prefer to Ibsen's cyanide of mercury or 
any other equivalent. For when I saw 
Brand, his master creation, dying on the 
snow-covered heights, I wished I were 
living in another age, when the art of cari- 
cature was not known. I thought of Soc- 
rates, the master creation of God, dying in 
prison, and I thought of the Christ dying 
on the cross. And what avails my philos- 
opher's abstractions, and my Manuel 
Maker's practical wisdom, and my Dra- 
matist's hectic inventions, in the face of 
these? Indeed, the world would be richer 
and happier for a few more seers and 
sages like Socrates and Tabrizi, who would 
not condescend to write a book. For not 
[89] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

by the written word, or by mummery on 
the stage, but silent and head bowed we 
best answer the query of Pilate. The Christ 
on the cross, Socrates in prison — that is my 
answer to the Roman procurator of Judea. 



[90] 



"MYSELF WHEN YOUNG DID 
EAGERLY FREQUENT" 

BUT, unlike Omar, I came out of an- 
other door, not regretting wholly my 
adventure. For I have a reverence for 
Science, which is exceeded only by my 
reverence for what is beyond Science. The 
Unknown and the Unknowable, though not 
always helpful in the ordinary pursuits of 
life, have a fascination that no knowledge, 
no discovered mysteries of creation, can 
ever excell. And yet, I have often gone 
with my empty bucket to the well of Science 
only to find that its water, though refresh- 
ing, does not quench the thirst. I have 
often, too, to satisfy my curiosity, thrown 
stones in the well, thinking that I could 
sound its depth. The astronomer and the 
geologist who saw me, smiled and passed 
on. But the naturalist, who was loath to 
let me go away unsatisfied, entertained me 
with one of his wonderful tales. 

He told me how varieties in animals 
gradually develop into species ; how certain 
[91] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

causes, which in brief periods produce 
varieties, in long periods give rise to types ; 
how the colors of animals are useful for 
concealment from their prey; how they are 
acquired, transmitted, distributed, and lost. 
He also discoursed of the hoof of the 
horse, and how it developed from a thick- 
ened nail ; of the pest insects and scales 
threatening the ruin of orchards, and how 
they can be fought by insect allies ; of the 
grasshoppers, and how they may be killed 
by a fungus disease cultivated for that 
purpose; of the colors and scents of blos- 
soms, and how they attract insects and 
bees ; of plants that hold the key to buried 
wealth, indicating as they do mineral veins. 
These, and many more fascinating and use- 
ful details, Science can relate. But the 
fact that they are useful soon dispels the 
fascination. And my learned friend the 
naturalist was silent when I asked him to 
explain to me the life-principle of growth 
and decay in the butterwort, the black 
scale, the woodchuck, or the lion. I did 
not mention man, whose romance, as 
[92] 



MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 

written in the Book of Evolution, he 
started to relate. 

But I had heard this before, and asked 
him, therefore, to start where it ended. 
Not being able to read through the covers 
of what was to him a closed book, however, 
he referred me to the horticulturist, whom 
I found absorbed in the business of "fixing 
the type." But he had a little time to 
spare, seeing that I was an interested and 
earnest seeker of knowledge. And he 
revealed to me the wonders of Menders 
discovery, which was in itself truly won- 
derful. He demonstrated — the proof was 
irrefutable — how the dwarf pea, born of a 
tall ancestor, breeds true to dwarf ness ; and 
how the offspring of rusty wheat, by the 
aid of Mendelism, has been taught to re- 
sist disease. Now, this system, Mendelism,, 
the horticulturist would apply to the 
breeding of men. "Better teaching and 
better sanitation/' he said, "are but pal- 
liatives." Education is to man what a fer- 
tilizer is to the pea : the man might profit 
by it, but not his children. If the progress 
[93] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

of the race is to be permanent, it must 
depend, therefore, not on education, but on 
breeding. And as a corollary to Mendel's 
theory, he gave me this, from the author 
of the Descent of Man : "There should be 
open competition for all men ; and the most 
able should not be prevented by laws or 
customs (he might have added, or by ed- 
ucation) from succeeding best and rearing 
the largest number of offspring/' 

But there are others among us who claim 
to have irtfade a greater discovery than 
Science. These people scoff at romance, 
and extol a social system that would better 
man and redeem society, not by elimination, 
which breeding presupposes, but by the 
levelling process. Human power to them 
is an unmitigated evil; intellectual ability, 
a curse; genius itself, a crime. Never- 
theless, it was one of their protagonists 
who wrote the Romance of Equality. But 
Carl Marx, its author, sees no salvation 
for humankind, except in political econ- 
omy, the most uninteresting, to me, of all the 
sciences and, methinks, the least ennobling, 
[94], 



"MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 

For it promotes in a nation aggressiveness, 
sordidness, greed; and it schools the indi- 
vidual in the infinite stupidities of life — in 
figures, and measures, and stock-taking, 
and such like. Political economy is the 
bible of the philistine. And the philistine 
is one who has neither intellectual nor 
spiritual needs. Even the theory of evolu- 
tion is more uplifting. 

And Mendelism, in a material sense, is 
nearer to the truth. For though a votary 
of Marx, who, we will admit, is a slave 
under present political and industrial con- 
ditions, may succeed eventually in freeing 
himself, will he be able to transmit this 
freedom to his offspring? "A dwarf pea, 
born of a tall ancestor, breeds true to 
drawfuess." And no knowledge in the 
science of political economy, no mastering 
of its details of production and consump- 
tion, no faith in the laws that govern them, 
can be of any help to man in combatting 
heredity and disease. If those who free 
themselves from the bondage of capital 
and labor have no other need than to earn 
[95] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

more money and work less, if their needs, 
in other words, are purely material, no 
matter how free they might become, they 
can not, I am certain, ever become the 
parents of better offspring, They can 
only transmit to their children the desire, 
the passion, at best, for freedom and health 
and comfort. And I am not certain whether 
they have not handicapped them for the 
struggle, the battle they have to fight for 
themselves, in living as they did a purely 
materialistic life. 

For though the children themselves 
achieve power, they remain, indeed, slaves. 
And a slave, born of a freed slave, will 
breed true to slavery. The levelling pro- 
cess, in this way, wreaks its vengeance 
upon the heads of those who uphold its 
infallibility — and it perpetuates its curse. 
Doubt it not. On the whole, the material- 
istic conception of history, as propounded 
by Carl Marx, — the conception that the 
fundamental factor in the development of 
any nation, is the economic factor, that is 
the way in which a nation produces and 
[96.] 



MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 

exchanges its commodities, — is the narrow- 
est, shallowest, most sordid, and most 
pernicious that ever was conceived by a 
man with any pretension to learning and 
wisdom. It is a shallow well, indeed, that 
of Marx, and its water withal is brackish. 
I turn away from it, thinking how well it 
could be filtered, if it were allowed to pass 
through the channels of religion, at least, 
and the arts. For these can be of great 
help, in spite of the breeding theory of 
Mendel. 

More than that. For I believe — holding 
as I do to the idea of the potentiality of 
the Unknown and the Unknowable — that 
religion and the arts can confound Mendel 
in the end and upset all his demonstrations 
about the pea, when they are applied to 
man. Neither science, then, nor education 
is a panacea. But a reverence for the Un- 
known, an open mind, a sense of awe 
before the Unknowable, a quickening hope, 
an implicit faith in its potentialities, — these 
will accomplish the miracle that Marx and 
Mendel and Darwin have only partly dis- 
[97] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

covered and described. For the laborer 
without a spirituality, without a developed 
sense for the beautiful and the true,— the 
laborer, or the capitalist for that matter, 
without intellectual and spiritual needs, is 
a slave, and the son of a slave, and the 
parent of a slave, even though he become 
the chief of all the Soviets of Russia. And 
neither through Mendelism, nor Darwin- 
ianism, nor Socialism alone can he achieve 
his own redemption and freedom. Doubt 
not that. And by the way, was it not 
Wagner who said that the redemption of 
Society is possible only through music? 



[98] 



THE PATH OF VISION 
Part Second 



I 

FROM CONCORD TO SYRIA 

WHAT have I brought with me from 
the Paradise of the New World, you 
ask. What have I gained in the country of 
gold and iron, of freedom and trusts? How 
much have I accumulated in the land of 
plenty and profusion — how big a draft do 
I present at the Imperial Ottoman Bank? 
Ah, yes. These are pertinent questions, 
my neighbor. I went to America with a 
lean purse; I came back, alas, not purseful 
but purseless. Do not conclude from this, 
however, that I am poor. On the contrary. 
I deposit in many banks, including the 
Bank of Wisdom ; and my credit is good 
in many kingdoms, including the Kingdom 
of the Soul. And of a truth, the more I 
draw on my accounts, no matter how big 
the sum, the bigger my balance becomes. 
This is, indeed, a miracle of the Soul — a 
paradox not defined or described in the 
illustrated catalogues of market-men. 

"His best companions, innocense andhealth; 
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth." 
[101] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

I come back to my native country with 
no ulterior political or maleficent purpose. 
I am not here to undermine the tottering 
throne of his Eminence the Patriarch; nor 
to rival his Excellency the Pasha in his 
political jobbery and his eclat; nor to su- 
persede any decorated chic Bey in office; 
nor to erect a filature near that of my rich 
neighbor; nor to apply for a franchise to 
establish a trolley-car system in the Leban- 
ons. "Blameless and harmless the sons 
of God." And I share with them at least 
the last attribute, Excellencies and worthy 
Signiors. 

I return to my native country on a little 
— er — private business, — only, perhaps, to 
see again the cyclamens of the season. And 
I have brought with me from the Eldorado 
across the Atlantic a pair of walking shoes 
and three books published respectively in 
Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. The 
good Grey Poet, the Sage of Concord, and 
the Recluse of Walden are my only com- 
panions in this grand conge. Whitman and 
Emerson and Thoreau are come to pay you 
[102] 



FROM CONCORD TO SYRIA 

a visit, my beloved Syria. 

But who are these strangers ? I am asked. 
Why do they come so late? What is their 
mission to Syria, that is to say, their de- 
sign upon her? Ah, dear Mother, my 
companions are neither missionaries, nor 
tourists, nor philanthropists. They come 
not to shed tears with you — like the paid 
mourners of antiquity; they come not to 
gaze at your ruins and rob you of the 
remnants of your temples and your gods ; 
they come not to pity your poverty and 
trim the sacred ragged edges of the gar- 
ment of your glory. My companions knew 
and loved you before you became the help- 
less victim of cormorant hierarchs and 
decorated obscurants and rogues. Not 
that they ever visited you in the flesh ; but 
clothed in the supernal and eternal mystery 
of genius, they continue to live and journey 
in the world of the human spirit, even like 
your ancient cedars, even like your sacred 
legends. 

With a little digression I shall endeavor 
to make my companions better known to 
[103] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

you. The elecampane, that most peculiar 
of perennial herbs, is not a stranger to 
your roads and fields. Its odor is strong, 
acrid, penetrating; the slightest touch of 
it has an immediate and enduring effect. 
When you approach it, you must, willy- 
nilly, carry away with you some token of 
its love. And one of its idiosyncracies is 
that it only blossoms when the hills and 
fields are shorn of every other variety of 
flower. It is the message of Spring to 
Autumn — the billet doux, as it were, of 
May to September. It bursts with beautiful 
yellow flowers, to console the almost 
flowerless season. And when all the bushes 
and herbs of the Lebanon coppices and 
fields are glorying in their fragrance and 
beauty, the elecampane waves its mucilagi- 
nous and wilted branches in perfect self- 
satisfaction. But when Nature withholds 
her favors from the wild daughters of 
Spring, the flowering of the elecampane 
begins in good earnest. Ay, the life beau- 
tiful is not denied even this bold and 
ungainly plant, which is ubiquitous in these 
[104] 



FROM CONCORD TO SYRIA 

hills. On the waysides, in the fields, on 
the high ridges, in the pine forests, over 
terraces and under grapevines, it grows 
and glories in its abundance — and its pun- 
gent generosity. Ah, how it fans and 
flatters the thistle ; how it nestles round the 
lilies of the valley; how it sprawls beneath 
the grapevines ; how it waves its pennant 
of self-satisfaction on yonder height ! Here, 
beneath an oak or a pine, it stands erect 
in its arrogance ; there, it is bending over 
the humble crocus, or sheltering the delicate 
and graceful cyclamen. 

Walt Whitman is the elecampane in the 
field of poetry. 

The furze, on the other hand, is the idol 
of your heaths and copses. This plant, of 
course, is not without its thorn. But its 
smooth and tender stem, its frail and fra- 
grant yellow blossoms, — those soft, wee 
shells of amber, — the profusion and the 
symmetry of its bushes, the delicacy of its 
tone of mystery, all tend to emphasize its 
attractive and inviting charms. A furze 
bush in full bloom is the crowning glory 
[105] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

of your heaths and copses, thickly over- 
grown. In the wadis below, one seldom 
meets with the furze; it only abounds on 
hill-tops, among gray cliffs and crannied 
rocks and boulders, where even the fern 
and the poppy feel at home. And a little 
rest on these smooth, fern-spread rock- 
couches, under the cool and shady arbor 
of furze-bushes, in their delicate fragrance 
of mystery, is ineffable delight to a pilgrim 
soul. Here, indeed, is a happy image of 
Transcendentalism. Here is Emerson for 
me — a furze-bush in full bloom. 

Now let me go down the valley to intro- 
duce to you the third of my companions, 
the stern and unique Thoreau. You are 
no doubt acquainted with the terebinth and 
the nenuphar. They are very rare in your 
valleys and forests. The terebinth is 
mantled in a vague and mystic charm; its 
little heart-shaped pods, filled with gum 
and incense, bespeak an esoteric beauty. 
Not that Thoreau ever dealt in incense. 
What he had of it, he kept for his own 
beatific self. 

[106] 



FROM CONCORD TO SYRIA 

Yes, the terebinth is a symbol of the 
moralist in Thoreau. And the nenuphar, 
with its delicate and cream-colored blos- 
soms, — the choicest in your dells and dales, 
— is a symbol of the poet. The first repre- 
sents for me the vigorous and ruthless 
thinker; the second, the singer, sweet and 
quaint. For does not the terebinth stand 
alone in a pine grove, or beneath some 
mighty ridge, or over some high and ter- 
ribly abrupt precipice? And so, too, the 
nenuphar. The terebinth, moreover, can 
bear fruits of poetry. Graft upon it a 
pistachio and it will give forth those deli- 
cious and aesthetic nuts, — those little em- 
eralds in golden shells, — so rare outside of 
Asia. 

These, then, are my companions, dear 
Mother. The terebinth and the nenuphar 
of your valleys — Thoreau. The flowering 
furze-bush on your hilltips, with a smooth 
and mighty boulder for its throne — Emer- 
son. The acrid elecampane in your fields, 
on your waysides, in your vineyards — 
Whitman. 

[107] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

And if the symbol does not fit the sub- 
ject, or the subject is not at ease in the 
symbol, the fault is not mine; for m!y 
American walking shoes are new, and my 
Oriental eyes are old. But those who slip 
on the way, believe me, often see deeper 
than those who do not. 



[108] 



II 

MY NATIVE HORIZON 

NATURE in Mt. Lebanon is as beautiful 
as she is exacting. The seasons obey 
her command and are ever ready to take 
up their cue when she speaks. What 
wonder after a million rehearsals and one ! 
They are as punctual as a solar eclipse, 
as mild as the breath of Olympus, as 
equable as the humor of an Oriental sage. 
And never late or in a hurry. Neither 
impatient are they to enter ere the curtain 
rises, nor querulous should it ever rise too 
soon. It seldom does. 

And the seasons follow one another with 
the precision of marching regiments. They 
do not step on each other's heels, nor do 
they leave a vacancy between them for the 
imps of chaos. No, they neither borrow 
nor steal from each other in these climes. 
Winter, for instance, has as much respect 
for the calendar as the moon; he never 
makes his appearance before Autumn folds 
his tent and silently steals away. Nor is 
Autumn so selfish and inconsiderate as to 
[109] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

remain in the lap of Nature, when Winter's 
steps are heard behind the gate of Mt. 
Sanneen. Spring is never shy and coquet- 
tish in taking up the cue. We do not have 
to go a-searching for her when the time 
comes as we often do in other parts of 
the world, especially in and around New 
York. 

My native horizon is not very far away, 
O my Brother of Manhattan, and not as 
alien as it seems. Leave the cloud-draped 
domes, and the sombre sky, and the sleety 
streets of our beloved City for a spell and 
come with me to the Theatre of the An- 
cient World, to the land of legend and 
prophecy, to the vine-clad hills of Tammuz 
and the cedar-crowned heights of Lebanus. 
Don't look up your geography, or your 
Bible, or your Baedeker. We are not now 
concerned with these. Behold ! Winter, in 
giant strides across the hills, makes his way 
to the Mediterranean. He shakes the snow 
from his feet at the portals of Mt. Hermon, 
and, lightly over the new-born cyclamens 
in the terraced land, he hastens to meet 
[110] 



MY NATIVE HORIZON 

Nature and say farewell. He utters his 
last speech and makes his exit with grand 
Thespian effect. And as his last echo dies 
away beyond the nascent warmth of the 
first sun-kissed cedar bough, the footsteps 
of Spring are heard in every glen, are seen 
in bud and clove, are sensed in the unsealed 
spices of copse and dale. She comes anon 
with her singing gardens and sighing 
zephyrs, with her verdant fields and 
dancing bowers. Yea, she is punctual and 
refulgent in her appearance as Venus or 
Jupiter in the Lebanon sky. Here is order, 
equableness, continuity ; — a training, in- 
deed, that mars not art; — a discipline that 
shakes even the incense in its terebinth sack 
from its sleep and brings the very sala- 
mander to attention. Here Nature beau- 
tifully performs the Master-Dramatist's 
masterpiece. And here too the weather 
prophets are safe in pursuing their 
business. They can forecast with the ut- 
most precision, without offending either 
Dramatist or Actors. Between Nature in 
my native hills and the learned folk who 

[in] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

write the calendar there is the deepest 
mutual sympathy and respect. 

The seasons come and go, but the mark 
of their footsteps on my native horizon are 
ineffaceable. Here Time has erected eter- 
nal monuments to his departing children. 
In Mt. Sanneen, rising in the East over 
a dozen peaks slurred together, we behold 
Winter shrouded in snow; in the tiger- 
spotted escarpments, in the grey cliffs, bar- 
ren and amorphous, forming a huge wall to 
the deep gorge in which the river flows, we 
have a fitting monument to Autumn ; while 
in the lowlands facing the Mediterranean, 
the orange orchards and the olive groves 
are beautiful monuments to Summer and 
Spring, wrapped in the light green of the 
fields and buried in the warm brown soil 
of life perennial. Indeed, my native 
horizon is a cyclorama of all the seasons. 
And the sun rising in Summer over the 
snow-covered tomb of Winter, from 
behind the serrate and spotted peaks of 
Mt. Sanneen, presents a deeply suggestive 
contrast. It makes me think of the snow 
[112] 



MY NATIVE HORIZON 

flakes of humanity melting under the sun 
of life, and flowing in the valley of love 
and hope, between the deep canyon-walls 
of pain and joy, to reach the shore of the 
Eternal. (Now, this is pompous and over- 
wrought, but the Mara of my Arabic is on 
me— -and on my race.) 

And I would that the seasons of the year 
were a fitting background to the human 
symbol; but what hope is there for a race 
that lives so close to Nature and profits 
not by it? Cattle huddle together in a 
storm. The birds in their migrations follow 
their leader. Even the bees, even the 
ants — but the proverbial wisdom of the 
ages is as futile as the warning of Nature. 
My poor, proud, distressed and distracted 
little race, now in its autumn days — will 
it survive the approaching storms of the 
coming winter? Will it ever regain the 
glory of its ancient springs? Will its 
children, who are still pagans at heart, ever 
realize again the beauty of art in Nature 
and the power of Nature in art? Scattered 
in every continent, looking in every direc- 
[1131 



THE PATH OF VISION 

tion — -except the one pointing to Self — for 
a savior, and chopping commerce, mean- 
while, or rhetoric, or gangrened nationalism 
on their decayed backlogs of life, will they 
ever become sensible again of the Awaken- 
ing? The harbinger of Spring, will they 
know him should he appear? The herald 
of Summer, will they receive himj should 
he come? O, ye weak races of Man, what 
are you going to do with the few soul- 
Titans that are of you and with you ? Will 
you deliver them as bound captives to a 
foreign despot? Will you sell them for a 
decoration? Ye little peoples of the land, 
ye disinherited and downtrodden children 
of the earth, the big throbbing heart of the 
world is with you. So be you with your 
soul-Titans, and rise to the summits of 
love and light and freedom and power. 
(Sometimes I forget that I am writing in 
English and to people little used to dithy- 
ramb and dogma outside a certain form of 
art.) 

But the majestic beauty of my native 
horizon is marred, alas, by the pitiable 
[114] 



MY NATIVE HORIZON 

poverty and squalor of hunijan life. And 
what is one to do with one's heart? Here 
is a broad verdant slope, rising high to the 
very feet of Mt. Sanneen; it is studded 
with clusters of pink gable houses, with 
pyramids of white and bluish stone; — it is 
at night a brilliant spectacle — a sight for 
the gods. And no less beautiful is it in 
the day. Behold these homes, half-hidden 
in mulberry and poplar and surrounded 
with thick pine forests, rising from terrace 
to terrace, like the steps of an altar with 
its objects of decoration, its flowers and 
icons and wax figures. Indeed, this makes 
a most beautiful altar to Nature. 

But the life, think on the life behind this 
outward show, under these trappings and 
decorations. Once I likened the village on 
the breast of that gentle and hospitable 
mountain to the decorations on the breast 
of a successful Turkish diplomat. And the 
diplomat protested Turkish fashion — 
Istagferitllah effendum ! Which means, in 
unequivocal language, Allah forgive you, if 
you have not flattered me — Allah forgive 
[1151 



THE PATH OF VISION 

me. if you have. And it is well at times 
that ambiguity, like a summer cloud, should 
temper the noon-day heat of our thought. 
For what difference is there — the thought 
was eating into me, while I trifled with the 
image — what difference is there between 
the life that deifies a silk rag or a piece of 
copper and the life that soils its lips and 
forehead in the dust before them. Here 
are the people and their decorated nobil- 
ities 

The Lethean breezes, blowing in the 
evening from the East, awaken the pagan 
in man, — the artist, — the lover of sheer 
beauty. And often, in contemplating this 
fascinating village, my fancy would west- 
ward wing itself. And my fellow man 
and the destiny of my race would no longer 
trouble me. The little lights behind the 
glass casements of the gabled houses, fixed 
and faint as the distant stars, are like so 
many diamonds in the crow r n of some syl- 
van goddess. And in places where the 
houses are crowded, piled above each other, 
a cascade of light in a frame of shimmjering 
[116] 



MV NATIVE HORIZON 

purple f ciliated by the bright pink gables, 
suggests to me the skyscrapers of New 
York at dusk or the electric legends of its 
White Way at night. And that renews my 
hope as well as my anxiety. 

The weak races, I ask, why are they so 
strong in their land of adoption, so weak in 
their native land,^ — so bold and daring 
there, so docile here? And the moon dis- 
appears in the clouds, as if she did not care 
to listen. I look with half-shut eyes and 
in the seen I see the unseen. Behind the 
clouds I behold the moon smiling mys- 
tically ; within the darkness I see the po- 
tential spark of the eternal fire ; and behind 
the faint lights of the village I see the 
moving, darkness of the human soul. And 
so, I say to myself : Depend not always on 
the known senses; look at things with half- 
shut eyes. And often I do so. Even with 
the eye of the soul into things moral and 
social. 

I look out of my northern window in 
the day on a prospect terrible, wild and 
majestic. The valley below, the deep 
[H71 



THE PATH OF VISION 

gorge, the dizzy precipices, the escarpments 
spotted here and there with laurels, tere- 
binths, scrub oaks, the broad slope on the 
other side of the river, decked with olives 
and mulberries and terraced homes, and 
the hill-tops fringed with pines rising 
behind and above each other, — all this is 
beautiful to hehold, especially through 
half-shut eyes. Thus seen, the grey of the 
rugged ridges seems to melt and fuse in 
the bright green of the fields and the sable 
of the heaths. And between the brown soil 
on the breast of the hill and the barren 
cliffs below there is a bond of common 
sympathy and mutual affection. Yes, under 
the soil I can see barren cliffs, and under 
the barren cliffs I behold arable stretches 
of land. So with Nature, so with Man 
and the races of Man. In this sense, at 
least, my native horizon, methinks, is the 
horizon of my race, and under the seasons 
of the year are the seasons of my country. 
Nor are the monuments and temples lack- 
ing. For right behind Mt. Sanneen is the 
Acropolis of Baalbek, and farther East 
[118] 



MY NATIVE HORIZON 



are the ruins of Palmyra. The one is a 
monument to the Spring, the other to the 
Suntaer of my country's past. 



[U9] 



THE PATH OF Vi'STON 
III 

MINE OWN COUNTRY 

T7VEX to one who loves her and accepts 
-*-' the rigor of her economy as part of 
her lasting reward, nature is not every- 
where in a communicable mood, nor is she 
always the same. Her disposition often 
changes with our own; her appeal seldom 
reaches the discordant heart. Her inner 
voice is never heard bythe passing stranger. 
To say that we love nature only when we 
take the pains to understand her, is trite; 
but we can only partly understand her 
when we suffer her to impose upon us her 
supreme will. She unveils for those who 
linger and wait; and she speaks only to 
him w r ho stands in reverence before a moss 
or a fern as before the greatest of the 
mysteries of the universe. A bird is sing- 
ing in the branches of a hemlock; a worm 
is eating into its bark. The ranger passes 
by indifferent to both, nothing seeing or 
hearing. But the poet-naturalist lingers, 
[120] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

eager to see and learn ; and with an undivi- 
ded heart, an observing eye and mind, he 
returns again and again to his schooling, 
discovers the secret of both bird and worm, 
informs the music and the silence with a 
spirit of his own, and actually adds to the 
idealism and the practical knowledge of 
man. He saves the tree for the State and 
he saves the song for the world. Strictly 
speaking, the pages of nature's book we 
admire the most are those that bear mar- 
ginal notes of our own personality and 
experience. 

That is why, I think, Thoreau would not 
have felt as much at home in the rugged 
splendors of the ancient Lebanons as he 
did in the placid solitudes of Walden 
woods. He might have been a naturalist 
there, but not a poet; even as a stranger, 
coming to Concord from a distant land, 
might only find in the Thoreau-country the 
visible landscape, not of Thoreau's poetic 
Soul, but of nature's least poetic moods. 
This particular page of her book leaves him 
cold, and the marginal notes are often il- 
[121] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

lusory. It may be that he did not come 
at the right time, or he did not open the 
book at an auspicious moment. But more 
likely his heart had been preempted else- 
where, so that, outside a particular spot, 
he finds Carlyle's obvious remark, One 
green field, all green fields, damping his 
enthusiasm, hopelessly extinguishing in him 
every poetic rapture. 

Such has been my experience when I 
visited Concord, such, my disappointment 
in the Catskills that, although a lover of 
nature in all her moods, I found myself 
turning from her text to Thoreau's margin- 
al notes and those of his distinguished but 
less poetic successor John Burroughs. And 
while I enjoy their chants, I can not be a 
worshipper at their shrines, nor can I even 
pretend to share the least intimacy with 
their goddess, having already pledged my 
soul at another temple. For though our 
faith and our rituals too are the same, our 
gods differ. It is curious, indeed, how the 
universal spirit sometimes carries us back 
to the parochial. Like the Ujigami of 
[122] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

Japan, we all have our distinct deities, 
which we invest with our own personality. 
In this sense, we are all self-worshippers : 
the gods of our allegiance, our devotion, 
are the gods of our pride. Else why should 
we be so attached to the soil, the plants, 
the flowers, the cliffs of our native land? 
There is something even in a familiar fern 
that leaves in the soul the impress of its 
own locality. 

In my own country the flowers are the 
toys of our childhood; they are nature's 
precious presents, which she never fails to 
bring us on every holiday. Even on Christ- 
mas she calls the children to her snow- 
crowned heights to surprise them with her 
wild violets. And these they bring to the 
altar of the local Saint, who promises to 
fulfill all their desires if they pray for them 
while picking the flowers in his name. 
Once I remember, in a fit of envy and 
anger I prayed for the death of a boy who 
got ahead of me to a favorite spot under 
a sheltering rock, where the violets bloomed 
in abundance. A week later there was an 
[123] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

epidemic of smallpox in our village, and 
the boy, my playmate, was carried off by 
the disease. I was so angry with the Saint 
for answering in this instance my prayer 
that never after would I pray to him or 
pick the violets in his name. For if he 
heard me when I offered the prayer, I 
argued, he must have heard me also when 
I took it back. Thus early did I waver in 
my religious devotion; but nature, never- 
theless, continued to bring me her presents, 
the flowers. Which made me love her the 
more. I even set up for myself a local 
Saint of her own, — St. Cyclamen I called 
him, — in a grove of pines, under the pro- 
tection of the Cross. Why did I compro- 
mise with the Church, I knew not then — I 
know not now. But there it is, in the 
pine-grove, niy Temple of the Flowers and 
the Christ. And whether a lover of nature 
be a poet, or a philosopher, or a child, he 
can at best only pretend to be indifferent 
to the call of the flowers of his own locality, 
which bloom every year on the altar of his 
faith. Perennially they call, and, although 
[124] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

we be in the farthermost parts of the 
world, they seldom fail in the calling. Else 
why should I— and I die a hundred deaths 
in a sea voyage — cross the ocean again and 
again to visit my native land? 

America too is the land of my birth, my 
second birth, so to speak, which is more sig- 
nificant, to myself at least, than the first. 
And here I have often found myself in the 
bosom of nature, comforted and reassured. 
Here are daisies as lovely as the soil and 
sun and rain ever made; but such loveliness 
is marred for me by a sad-sweet recollec- 
tion : the daisies that have known the 
caresses of my infant love, that have heard 
the lispings of my superstitious heart, are 
sweeter of breath, stronger of appeal. 
Here are gardens where the resources and 
ingenuity of man would surpass the beauty 
of nature; but wherever I turn my eyes 
among the elegant variety of their flowers, 
I can see only the image of the homely 
sweet-basil, my mother's favorite plant. 
Here too are cultivated cyclamens hardier 
and more beautiful than the delicate crea- 

r 1251 



THE PATH OF VISION 

tures that peep out of the crannies and 
crevices of my native rocks and terrace- 
walls; but whenever I behold them I fain 
would run barefoot again in the Lebanon 
hills, ascending and descending the flower- 
covered terraces, to gather a sheaf on 
Good Friday of the April harvest and lay 
it at the foot of the Cross. And the hem- 
locks of the land of my second birth are as 
majestic and as generous as the Lebanon 
pines ; but the fact that they have a claim 
upon my gratitude, having lived with them 
for a space and profited by their intimacy 
and healing influence, does not, and can 
not, alienate my first love for the trees of 
my boyhood, — of my childly joys, — and my 
child-faith. Alas, the wrath of my local 
Deity is upon me! 

What is it then that would conquer the 
cosmic spirit in us and, overcoming all the 
faculties of reason, attach us in affection 
to certain spots and objects, which we call 
Home or Mother-Country? In my own 
case, it can not be patriotism; for I never 
had a chance to be a patriot, not even in 
[126] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

the Johnsonian sense of the word. More- 
over, in a land where the freedom of the 
spirit, even the freedom of the citizen, has 
not yet been realized, one can better serve 
one's country from a safe distance. I have 
often given it absent treatment with little 
or no result. My subject and I are not 
en rapport. Enough said of patriotism. 
But whence comes it, this love for one's 
country ? One's language ? English to me 
is as dear, though not as explicable in some 
of its idiosyncracies, as the Arabic. Do- 
mestic life? the customs and traditions of 
the hearth? I did not love my own home 
when I lived in it ; I little appreciated the 
domestic peace and beauty of it; and I 
was glad to say good-bye to mine own 
people when I left it. Does it consist of 
one's national faith, of the religion of one's 
ancestors, this love for one's country? I 
would not be so irresistably attracted by it, 
if it did. For my race, ever since the days 
of Antiochus the Great, nay, back to the 
times of my fellow-scrivener, Sanchunia- 
thon the Phoenician, never had a real 
[127] 



THE PATH OF VISION 5 

national faith ; and my father's religion was 
in the pocket of my native robe when I 
threw it overboard the first tirrfe I crossed 
the Atlantic. 

Why then, I repeat, this chronic nos- 
talgia? My local Deity forever calling? 
I might go there only to find the Temple 
in ruins. Nature's presents heaped at my 
door? The heart craves knowledge now, 
not affection ; the torments of the under- 
standing can not be wholly assuaged by the 
Beautiful. Do the toys of our childhood 
become in latter days the toys of our souls ? 
Here. I think, I am nearer to the truth. 
For we must be as children again to be 
able to enjoy, from purest spiritual motive, 
our native soil and the enchanted scenes of 
our childly days and dreams. And the 
comely simplicity of childhood, its mystic 
innocense, is incarnate in the trees, the 
flowers, the streams and the hills of the 
mother-land. Everything a child touches 
in his holy years lives afterward in the 
pious memory a life of its own and is 
subject, like the flowers, to the vicissitudes 
[128] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

of the seasons. It grows, it blooms, it 
withers ; and withering, it spreads of its 
petals a rug under the feet of remeniscence. 
It paints the horizon of the soul a sullen 
gold, — it fills its resting places with an. 
entrancing perfume. The child-soul is a 
nursery which afterward often becomes . 
a deserted garden in which we love to 
stroll. It is a cathedral in which are 
buried the cherubs of our fancy and 
the heroes of our dreams. — The cyclamen 
is going to be my intercessor at the altar of 
my local Saint. As I draw it gently out 
of its nich in the rock, to preserve its. 
diapered leaf and every inch of its delicate 
russet stem, I impart to it a life separate 
from its own, which I cherish in my dream- 
moments more than any worldly dream;. 
And our mother's nurseries, how we would 
rancask them to make a child's holiday! 
Those same flowers and odoriferous plants 
that we destroyed in infant rapture, still 
grow and bloom perennially to diffuse 
around them such joy and faith in life as 
mortal man, in his recurring doubts, peren- 
[129] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

nially requires. 

These toys of childhood, these spiritual 
tokens, fragile but unbreakable, live, in- 
deed, in the flowers we used to gather for 
our local Saint; in the woods where we 
were often lost or caught by the storm; in 
the tall grass through which we would 
wade, playing hide and seek; in the trees 
we used to climb, whose branches still 
murmur our songs of joy; in the roaring 
rivulets whose wintry wrath we defied ; in 
the Summer vineyards whose gold and 
purple grapes we stole; in the April fields 
whose lotus and iris and daffodil we gath- 
ered for Palm Sunday. The love for the 
mother-country that does not consist essen- 
tially of these, is not spiritually pure 
enough to engage our thought. 

And yet, to be honest with the reader to 
the end, I must add, having already spoken 
of a second birth, that in its nursery Con- 
cord has sown a pinch of the flower-seeds of 
transcendentalism. But what chance have 
these seeds to grow in the cold and sunless 
habitations of the city? In my ceaseless 
[130] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

search, however, I found a window once 
through which, now and then, a glint of 
sunlight came to surprise us. The seeds 
showed signs of life, which encouraged me 
to seek a place for them on the outskirts 
of nature, where they first grew to tender- 
ness and beauty, in confusion and abund- 
ance. But they were smitten of a sudden, 
almost asphyxiated. From all the public 
highways around us came the fatal breath 
of the God of Gasoline. Deep into the glen, 
therefore, and far from the highways of 
motoring-man, we remove, seeking the 
virgin soil in the very heart of nature. 

But here were wild flowers that reminded 
me of the roses, the jasmines and the sweet- 
basils of the homely nurseries of Lebanon. 
And in the deep silence of the woods the 
shadows of my native pines arose before 
me, above the majestic hemlocks, to say 
salaam. The myrtle and the sage around 
the scrub oaks beckoned and called. The 
crocus, the anemone, the cyclamen, bloom- 
ing everywhere, as by magic, over the pale 
images of the asters and the goldenrods, 
[131] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

remonstrated with me like true lovers. 
And yet, in the heart of mine own country 
the flower-seeds of Concord may not fare 
better than they did in the cold and sunless 
habitations of the city or on the outskirts 
of nature now hardened by the highways of 
the God of Gasoline. Go to Concord and 
transplant them there? It is long since 
the flower first bloomed in that soil that 
it would not, I'm afraid, be recognized to- 
day. It ir#ght die of neglect. Alas for the 
nursery of the soul ! But our mothers' 
nurseries remain, my Brothers, to yield us 
a little solace. And what matters it if my 
Mother be old and crabbed and unsympa- 
thetic? What matters it if she is not 
counted of the young and strong among 
nations? 

True, her history is that of a country 
without a flag or a national hymn ; but her 
divine message once stirred the innermost 
heart of the world. True, her traditions 
are those of a nation without a king, a 
people without a voice, a soul without a 
temple ; but her ancient spirit still lives and 
[132] 



MINE OWN COUNTRY 

is still destined to conquer and redeem. 
And although her garden-walls crumble on 
one side into desert waste and on the other 
into barren strands, her heritage is the 
Cross and a sea of flowers. Syria the land 
of roses, Syria the cradle and the tomb of 
the gods ! When Byblos adored Tammuz, 
when Baalbek worshipped Jupitor-Ammjon, 
when Galilee conquered Judea, when 
Arabia overcame Galilee, thou wert then a 
Fountain of the Spirit toward which turned 
a thirsty world. Thy temple was the 
temple of the universe, thy voice was the 
voice of God. From the Tigris to the Red 
Sea, from the Taurus to the Hijaz, thou 
hast ever been the garden of revelation 
and the battlefield of the creeds. But if 
the Prophets no longer thunder on thy 
mountains, the bulbuls still sing in thy dells 
and dales, the roses still blow on thy 
rugged brow, and the cedars, from their 
snowy heights, still cast their shadows over 
the golden sands. Syria the land of roses, 
Syria the cradle and the tomb of the gods, 
if thou wert to become a howling desert 
[133] 



THE PATH OF VISION 



to-morrow, thou wouldst still be the 
cheriched of nations and the coveted of 
empires. 



1134] 



IV 

OVER ANCIENT BABYLON 

T^ROM Aleppo to the City of the Abba- 
«*• side Khalifs, over ancient Babylon and 
Nineveh ! — O seers of Chaldea, did you 
ever behold this in your visions, — did you 
ever read of it in your book of stars? 

Indeed, the railroad and the aeroplane are 
rumbling to-day over buried Babylon. And 
in the golden silence of the desert the 
modern capitalist, after the Man of Neish- 
apur, will sing, 

Awake ! for steam is scattering to flight 
The Beduin tribes into eternal night. 

For after all, Nineveh and Babylon 
might only be asleep. To be sure, wherever 
there are streams of opalescent water, 
human life is imperishable, immortal. But 
sleep is often mistaken for death; and the 
apoplexy of a nation is of longer duration 
than that of an individual. Under the 
magic wand of modern industrialism, 
therefore, Babylon and Nineveh might rise 
again and put Paris and New York to 
[135] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

shame. No; they might rise and help to 
bring the better mind of Europe nearer to 
the East and the purer soul of India nearer 
to the West : they might become the con- 
necting link between the Orient and the 
Occident of the future. Geographically, 
this is logical; historically, it is possible. 
Meanwhile, the idealists in both continents, 
the proclaimers of the confederation of the 
world, may go on dreaming; and Capital, 
the pioneer of the children of dreams, will 
sing in the valley of the Euphrates the song 
of the dawn of industry. 

Awake ! for steam is scattering to flight 
The caravans into eternal night. 

And along with them, perhaps, the 
poetry of the Arab and his horse. But 
this larrijent over the passing of the poet 
might not be wholly justified. For after 
the nations of the past are resuscitated, 
after the work of creation, lasting six days 
or six centuries, is performed, Capital will 
want to rest and be entertained. She will 
welcome again the poet; she will build 
[136] 



OVER ANCIENT BARYLON 

temples to his Muse. At present, however, 
the bard must not hover on the horizon of 
Capital. We must forge ahead. Nothing 
in the way is sacred. 

The Young Turks themselves once spent 
a few piasters in this business of redemp- 
tion. They tried to mow down the Arabs 
to pave the way for the European steam 
engine. Now the English are conspiring 
against the lethal but sacred lethargy of 
the Euphrates. They will dam the river 
to bless its valley. They will mutilate, it, 
chop it into pools, so to speak, and cage its 
currents in canals and ditches to make them 
sing in the wilderness the song of plenty. 

Indeed, there is a kind of poetry, deep 
and elemental as Ossian's, even in the 
achievements of science, even in the me- 
chanical marvels of engineering. We live 
in an age, which, in its vast inclusions at 
least, is the iriost poetic of all ages. No 
nation, however far removed from the 
pivot of its dynamic influence, no people, 
however stolid and hidebound, is free to 
shake off its thrall or to reject its boon. A 
[137] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

truth or a fallacy uttered in London is 
echoed the following day in Baghdad; an 
idea born in New York soon captures the 
mind of Damascus; a discovery made in 
Paris benefits even the silk worms in the 
shadow of the Lebanon cedars. A marvel- 
lous thing this civilization, even to a sophis- 
ticated Oriental, who revels in its romance, 
which the scribes translate from the 
columns of the American and European 
newspapers, as he would in the Arabian 
Nights. Indeed, those who produced the 
Arabian Nights are to him incarnate in the 
makers of our civilization. Therefore — 
but let the logician draw his own conclu- 
sions. This international game of Give and 
Take is as baffling as any other. To lose 
in it is to gain, and vice versa. 

If the poet of Baghdad realized this, he 
would not waste his soul in lamentations 
over buried kingdoms. — O Babylon, Europe 
is desecrating thy sacred dust. O Nineveh, 
the Franks have come to mock at thy past. 
Over thy palaces, O Samiramis, over thy 
grave, O Belshazzar — but let the poet of 
[138] 



OVER ANCIENT BARYLON 

Baghdad sit upon the highway and lament. 
The train will soon be coming. 

Meanwhile, the doctors of the Moham- 
medan law, the ulema of Islam, will scan 
their sacred books to see if aught therein 
is mentioned about the railroad and the 
aeroplane. And if, after straining their 
theological faculties, they can not find, 
expressed or implied, a divine sanction of 
these inventions, they will forthwith curse 
them from the pulpit. Yes; this has al- 
ready been done in Nejd. But the Arabs, 
though they begin by waylaying the trains 
to Medina, will soon be laying rails them- 
selves across the Nefud. The genius of 
this industrial age is destined to world con- 
quest and power. And the Koran, that 
divine encyclopedia of the Muslem, has an 
elasticity of phrase that can be made to 
cover any heresy, ancient or mpdern, 
speculative or industrial. 

Speaking one day with one of the ulema 
of Damascus of the extravagance of prac- 
tical science, I mentioned the Meteorolog- 
ical Bureau at Washington, which has two 
[139] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

. hundred employees at its central office, and 
spends over a million dollars a year for the 
purpose of forecasting the weather. The 
sheikh held up his hands in horror, ex- 
claiming, "And all this to blaspheme the 
great Allah ! For who but He and His 
Prophet Mohammed can read in the Book 
of To-morrow? Is it not writ in the 
Koran. 'And what is in the bosom of the 
Heavens, and what is in the bosom of 
Time, and w r hat is in the bosom of woman, 
only Allah knoweth?" 

But the irate sheikh and the lacrymose 
poet are gently reminded by the modern 
editor, who in most cases is in aladinist, 
a free-thinker, that the times have changed, 
that the Prophet himself has said, Every 
Age hath its Book, and that the fabulous 
wealth and prosperity of America, for 
instance, are the natural outcome of co- 
operation. — They are the fruits of or- 
ganized industry, O my Brothers, — they 
are the legitimate offspring of the Trust. 
Let us, therefore, co-operate like the Am- 
ericans : let us organize the Trust. Science 
[140] 



OVER ANCIENT BARYLON 

will yet resuscutate Arabia. — Steam and 
Electricity will be the servants of her virtue 
and glory. But let us organize the Trust, 
and straightway. In the Trust, O my 
Brothers, is our salvation 

And my friend the social reformer will 
find, methinks, herein some food for 
thought. A distant view of the question, 
an Oriental view, is not unworthy of con- 
sideration. For when a people hail what 
another people spurn, when a nation blesses 
what another nation is cursing, then there 
must be still room on one side or the other 
for the deeper truth, the sounder view of 
the matter. Some people among us will 
find these between the curse and the bless- 
ing. I, for one, refuse to peep with the 
radical reformer into the boudoir of the 
Trust ; and I admire her not, as do the 
aladinists of Damascus, in her travelling 
toggery. But in her workaday clothes I 
behold her walking with the people, and 
I dare say she is tolerably human. 

For in spite of what is set down in the 
Criminal Code, I am convinced that the 
[141] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

Trust hath a soul Else how could she 
be so fair and so wicked, so voracious 
withal and so bounteous? Indeed, the soul 
of the Trust is accumulative, even like her 
capital. It is a somatic soul, as it were, 
which you might not find mentioned in the 
book of metaphysics, but which the skeptic 
might see, and touch, and even steal there- 
of. Behold it exteriorized in these monu- 
mental marvels of materialism. The Soul 
of the Trust ! — it broods in the mines ; it 
sings in the mills ; it cries in the Stock 
Exchange ; it sweats in the fields ; it throbs 
in the engine room; it vibrates in the elec- 
tric wire; it poetizes in the Marconi mys- 
tery; it hitches its aeroplane to the dog- 
star. 

Ay, the Trust hath a soul, believe me, and 
it is as good as all the other trust-in-Mam- 
mon souls of the present day, which were 
once divine and immortal. True, it has no 
sentiment. But who has, in this beautiful 
iron age? Neither Darwin nor Carl Marx 
ever worried about sentiment. Capital and 
Thought, these are the living principles of 
[142] 



OVER ANCIENT BARYLON 

the Trust. Of these is composed the dual- 
ity of her somatic soul. 

And Capital and Thought will dance in 
triumph over the tombs of ancient king- 
doms and in the valleys of sacred rivers, 
even as they do in the mills and mines and 
around the palaces and temples of Modern 
Industrialism. Thus sayeth my aladinist 
friend of Damascus, who never tires of 
repeating, In the Trust, O my Brothers, is 
our salvation. But let us hope he will be 
able to find the truth somewhere between 
his blessing and the curse of the social 
reformer. Or better still, beyond both. 
For the Trust, like all other human insti- 
tutions, must soon or late outgrow its use- 
fulness. Meanwhile there is something 
suggestive and useful in the enthusiasm 
of the Oriental. And if Europe gives 
Arabia a railway, Arabia gives Europe an 
idea. Which, I think, balances the account. 



[143] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

V 
OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

OF all the places of worship I know,— 
and I have lugged my unshrived soul 
and my weary limbs into many a foreign 
temple, — -the mosque has always impressed 
me as being by far the most democratic 
and the most unstinted in its varied hos- 
pitalities. There is nothing in it or in its 
economy to flatter the rich, or oft end the 
poor, to repel the weary, or distract the 
devout. The welcome it extends is not 
of the two-by-two pew order ; the solace 
it affords is no bread-and-cheese affair. 
And the Friday sermon, if you should care 
to hear it, is often taken bodily from the 
Koran and is, therefore, never extraneous ; 
— a ringing and harmless bit of eloquence 
that charms the ear and lulls the senses in 
celestial revery. The mosque is always 
big enough to hold the declaiming preacher 
and the sleeping worshipper in an incom- 
municable vacuity; for the pulpit is never 
[144] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

too near the enchanted corners, which offer 
a shelter to the body of the Muslem as well 
as to his soul. And here you often find a 
mumbling fakir, a blind beggar, a wayworn 
hammal, or a wayfaring Arab. In the 
most informal spirit of devotion, they drop 
in for a rest or a snooze; and they pros- 
trate themselves before a mihrab or stretch 
themselves on the cool marble under the 
arches, while a great sheikh or a prince of 
the blood in another corner is genuflecting 
on a precious Persian rug and swinging his 
torso to and fro in prayer. Bism illah ir- 
rihman irrahim! (In the name of Allah 
the most Merciful and Compassionate). 
The fakir telling his beads chants himself 
into a state of coma. The beggar yawns 
out, Ya- Allah, ya-Karim! and drops off 
as he kneels. The Beduin is stretched un- 
der the huge arch like a corpse. And no 
one is there ill-bred or impious enough to 
intrude upon any one in his holy occupa- 
tion. The mosque is a haven of rest to 
beggar and prince, a temple of democracy 
to the Faithful, a divine hostelry for the 
[145] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

children of Allah. Here the outcast finds 
a stone, at least, on which to lay his head. 
And the calm flows from the vast domes 
above him and fills the airy spaces all 
around. Only now and then it is inter- 
rupted by a sigh of ya-Allah, ya-Karim ! 
For though the mosque be in the tinkers' 
bazaar seldom a sound from the outer 
world reaches even its court or violates its 
hallowed silence. And in this vastness of 
spiritual repose the soul may loaf and in- 
vite the body, and the mind rr^ay doze and 
invite the soul. Without cymbals and bells, 
without organ and choir, without icons and 
statues, but with the lamps of faith and 
devotion ever burning, the soul is left to 
itself to find its way through an infinity of 
unworldly calm and silence to the divine 
infinities of the One Supreme — Allah. 

One day at noon, after a long tramp 
through the country, I went into the little 
mosque of a village to rest. I doffed 
my shoes at the door, realizing then the 
deep wisdom in the tradition. There ,are 
practical as well as spiritual reasons for 
[146] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

it. If it is a sacrilege to come booted into 
the House of God, it is worse than a sacri- 
lege to soil with the dust and mud of the 
road its precious rugs. Aside from these 
considerations, my shoes pinched, and I was 
only too glad to conform. Many others, I 
suppose, find in the custom a like relief. 
Inside the mosque there were but two at 
prayer — a venerable old man in one corner 
and a wizened half-naked beggar in an- 
other. I sat down on a straw mat under 
an arch, leaning my back against the pillar, 
stretching my weary limt>s, — feeling sweet- 
ly at home. Rest and relaxation, in these 
are the roots of purest devotion : and these 
you will always find in a mosque at any 
hour of the day, at any hour of the night. 
I prayed after my own fashion, and walked 
out with my two companions, my 
Brothers, praising Allah. The beggar 
happened to be a hammal who left his 
burden at the door, and being too heavy 
for him to lift alone, the venerable Sheikh, 
tucking his long silk sleeves, hastens to his 
assistance. Bismillah ! and the hammal 
[147] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

bowed in piety under his load, stiffens his 
neck to the rope around his head and, 
heavy but firm of step, walks away in the 
assurance of Allah. 

"You are not a Muslem," said the dis- 
tinguished Sheikh, detecting in me an alien 
manner. 

"I too worship Allah," I replied, lacing 
my shoes, "and honor the Prophets. " 

Whereupon he invited me to his house 
for lunch. Strangers meeting in the 
mosque become brothers. 

This reminds me of a visit to that Am- 
erican Mecca of fashion, Newport, where 
I went to pray in the Church of the Rich. 
A quaint, little wooden, barn-like building, 
outwardly a fitting symbol of the original 
spirit of Christianity, which was brought 
over, together with its first minister, from 
England. It was set up, not built, in New- 
port, a century ago. And this is considered 
very old in New England. But the stained 
glass windows, a distressing anomaly, with 
nothing in them to arrest the eye or tax 
the imagination, are absurdlv new and 
[148] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

whole. Not one of them is broken and 
cemented to give it the semblance of an- 
tiquity or to preserve a historic or a pious 
legend. Made in America, I presume. And 
like everything indigenous to this wonder- 
ful country, their value is measured with 
a golden rod. One of them was pointed 
out to me as being 'the thousand-dollar 
window' presented to the church by 
Mrs. — -— ; another, even more costly, by 

Mr. . It were uncharitable, indeed, to 

remeiriber names in such a blaze of muni- 
ficence; but I wonder how it is that those 
who are responsible for disfiguring the 
walls of this quaint and unpretentious 
church, have not tried to conceal their 
identity. I say 'disfigure* advisedly. For 
I can not conceive of a stained glass win- 
dow set in a thin wooden wall, without 
some outward device of architecture to 
subdue the effect of the sunlight upon it, — 
to shade the refulgence of its beauty. But 
Philanthropy can not live in the shade; 
Philanthropy will blow its trumpet on the 
roof-tops in the noonday sun. Thou Brass 
[1491 



THE PATH OF VISION 

Trumpet, never in those airy mosques of 
the silent East have I heard the faintest 
echo of thy shrillings. Nor did the Puri- 
tans, I suppose, ever hear it in their days. 

No doubt the stained glass windows 
would have been tabooed by them as was 
the organ, which was brought over with 
the church. Music, like our modern brass- 
trumpet philanthropy, shocked their sense 
of piety. They could not associate it 
with worship. It interfered with the di- 
gestion of the soul — it promoted impiety. 
If the organ, which was subsequently re- 
stored, is the one I heard, than I am, too, 
a Puritan. And the fact that it has now 
an electric action, does not make it less 
objectionable to those who seek peace in 
the House of God. I may be wrong, 
foolish, narrow in my idea of worship; I 
may not have an ear for music : but I sub- 
mit that no two of our poor jaded senses 
can be occupied simultaneously with equal- 
ly good purpose and effect. The shrill 
cymbals of an Oriental church may tear 
the ear, but they do not reach the soul; 
[150] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

the daf and the tomtoms of the dancing 
dervishes are innocuous, because of the 
fundamental absurdity of their scheme of 
salvation; the music in a modern restau- 
rant, and though it interferes with diges- 
tion and promotes dyspepsia and profanity, 
has no real spiritual after-effects : but 
when I hear a Miserere in a Church — and 
all Church music to me is a variation more 
or less of the same theme — and think that 
the salvation of my soul depends upon it, 
I can not go on and pray. The sepulchral 
notes seem to dance before my eyes in 
their winding sheets, and the invisible 
choir, alas, becomes a lugubrious joke. 
Judge if I was sacrilegious in the Church 
of the Rich. Instead of praying, or fol- 
lowing in the wake of devotion, I was 
counting the 'thousand-dollar' stained glass 
masterpieces, or marvelling at the amazing 
sounding board that hung above the min- 
ister's head as by a spider's thread. One 
day in the nick of service — Allah forgive 
me for the wanton vision! But the pre- 
cariousness of the situation held me for 
[151] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

a spell in a mingled sense of fear and 
excitement. What if this huge sounding 
board should crash upon his Reverence 
when he is lashing the air with his potent 
words. And yet, by a freak of chance, it 
may be the last thing to remain intact if 
the church were struck to-morrow by a 
thunderbolt or destroyed by an earthquake. 
Remarkable, too, are the quadrangular 
pews, which are big enough to hold a few 
arm chairs and a rocker, and which are 
so arranged that the worshippers can sit in 
them facing each other as in a drawing 
room. The vulgar rich/ the 'lazzaronis 
of wealth' as they are called in America 
by those, I suppose, who have failed to 
accomplish the miracle of riches or to at- 
tain the 'lazzaronic' state, must feel at 
home and quite at ease in these little 
drawing rooms of their church. Not with 
them, however, or those who denounce 
them, but only with the pews am I now con- 
cerned. Why should a place of worship, 
I venture the question, be parcelled into 
lots? Why not, as in a mosque, a clear 
[152] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

open space, unencumbered and untaxed, 
where you can come and stay when you 
please and as long as you please? Pews 
mean an imposed long service, an imposed 
tax, an imposed restriction on one's free- 
dom. You may want to go to church for 
five minutes of spiritual stimulation or for 
five hours of spiritual repose; in which 
case, locked in a pew T , you must either 
disturb or be disturbed in following your 
desire. 

But the pews of this Newport church, 
I was told, are neither to be sold, nor 
rented, nor given away: they must be ac- 
quired. Even as an estate or a mansion 
or a throne, they are hereditary. No 
stranger, therefore, can come into this 
church to pray, unless, by gracious suf- 
frage, he stand at the door. His, then, 
is the better chance of salvation. I shared 
the pew of mine host, which he must have 
acquired by right of conquest. For on the 
fly-leaf of the hymn book was written a 
name other than his own, — -a name of one 
of the distinguished families of the early 
[153] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

settlers, who might have descended of old 
England's wearers of the purple. The pew 
had gone through one of those social 
revolutions that result only in a change of 
name. And thus, no other name will be 
written on the fly-leaf of that hymn book 
in the future, except by the suffrage of the 
nobility of wealth. Snobbery this, indeed. 
But those who suffer from the disadvan- 
tage of riches, of whom even the Founder 
of Christianity has said a few mean things, 
— shutting them out of heaven with a 
parable, — ought not be grudged the right 
of making a little quadrangular heaven for 
themselves in a little church on earth, 
where they can commune with their God 
uninterrupted and undisturbed. Here, the 
poor rich lock themselves up for a brief 
spell, and no one in all the world has a 
right to intrude upon them in their devote 
moments. And they sit down in their arm- 
chairs, snug and serene, and sing the 176th 
hymn or the 61st psalm in perfect assur- 
ance, imbibing religion, at . every pore .and 
feeling, at peace with themselves, with the 
[154] 



OF CHURCH AND MOSQUE 

world, and with God. Even with the 
Minister, who hurls from his pulpit no 
Nazarine-parahles of Dives and Lazarus 
or the Needle's Eye and the Camel. No; 
the Most Right Reverend respects the 
attitude and peace of mind of his congre- 
gation, wherefore his tenure sacerdotal 
would seem less precarious than the pew- 
priveleges of its richest member. But that 
colossal sounding board is hanging above 
him as by a spider's thread, and some day, 
when, in the very nick of his sermon, he 
is applying the divine salve, it might give 
the congregation a different interpretation 
of his Mortal Text. 

Allah forgive me for what I have here 
set down. I came to this church to pray, 
not to cavil. And for those, distant and 
near, in present or past incarnation, who 
might have caused this unhappy turn of 
mind, I also invoke Allah's forgiveness 
and mercy. 

The service is over. But the essential 
part of it we behold in the narrow street 
in front of the church where a squad of 
[155] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

police are directing the high-lackered 
traffic. Slowly from many corners and by- 
ways invisible, it drags its length along, a 
train of sumptuous equipages, multicolor, 
multiform): — refulgent limousines adorned 
with classic-faced chauffeurs ; shimmering 
victorias drawn by high-stepping, full- 
blooded steeds ; liveried and cockaded foot- 
men leaping from their seats to open and 
close carriage doors ; — a bustle of van- 
ities, a flutter of conceits, — a dazzling array 
of outward splendor. 

Come, my Christian Brother, — come with 
me to the mosque. 



[156] 



VI 
THE ORIENTAL HERITAGE 

SLOWLY but eagerly, like a child, the 
Orient is moving towards an object 
of irresistible attraction. Nay, modern 
thought is gradually lifting it from the 
depths of hebetude and pious contentment 
up to the heights of progress and unrest. 
But whether progress will eventually over- 
come its unrest or unrest will soon or late 
disenchant it with progress, remains to be 
seen. 

One thing, however, is certain. The 
Orient can not keep up with the modern 
pace of science. Swathed in cant, satur- 
ated with tradition, given to abstractions, 
lulled in magnifications of speech and 
thought, the Oriental mind can not grasp 
the infinity of detail as well as the scope 
of scientific vision. The grafting of mod- 
ern ideas upon it may prove, in certain 
instances, the contrary; but the elements 
hostile to its growth and development, 
though not visible always on the surface, 
are as vital, as potent in the liberal thinkers. 
[157] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

who are making an honest effort to keep 
abreast of the times, as in the straitlaced 
conservatives. 

Moreover, the psychology of the Orient- 
als is essentially deductive. Which gives 
them, it is true, a certain sweep of vision, 
but deprives them of the faculty of co- 
ordination. They have yet to acquire the 
scientific habit of mind and to reconcile 
themselves to certain elemental truths 
about this planet, which have also a so- 
ciological and moral application. Evolution, 
conservation, even the law of gravity has 
not yet attained a decent footing among 
them. For they live not in the world; 
they live in the universe. They can see 
what is behind a mountain, but they can 
not see what is before their eyes. That is 
why, I think, they can better bear the 
burden of life. From the vantage of a 
sublimated resignation they see life as a 
whole. But that is why, too, when their 
vision fails or their resignation loses its 
divine support, they become irreconcilable, 
irrepressible, and absolutely irrational. 
[158] 



THE ORIENTAL HERITAGE 

As subjects of the State, for instance, 
they have behind them centuries of submis- 
sion checkered by anarchy and assassina- 
tion. Blindly they adhere to authority, 
blindly they rebel against it. Their obe- 
dience and their insurgency are both born 
of religion, — prompted by the fanaticism of 
one faith or another. To be sure, they have 
often risen against tyrants, but against 
tyranny itself, seldom or never. They can 
see a throne, but not the things of which a 
throne is made. 

On the other hand, they seldom lose, 
entirely and forever, their heritage of spir- 
itual wisdom. And w r hen they find it, after 
a religious upheaval or a period of political 
devastation, it soon becomes again a vital 
and vitalizing power. This is true of the 
past. But are they now in danger of losing 
it forever? I said that the Oriental mind, 
in its present state, can not encompass the 
vision of science. And the Orientals to- 
day can only see in science, in spite of all 
its seductions and promised blessings, a 
searchlight revealing distant material goals. 
[159] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

And they are beginning to see also that in 
the rush to reach these goals thousands fall 
at the first spreading point of light. Which 
is true. For if people have the will to 
strive, have they the power to sustain the 
will? 

I doubt whether the Orientals have. And 
I doubt too whether the Occidentals, having 
the power, have also the wisdom to see 
when that power becomes an instrument of 
destruction instead of progress. For even 
as human machines fed from the inex- 
haustible power-house of Civilization, there 
is a course which the Orientals and the 
Occidentals can safely pursue, — a course 
that will save one people from the destruct- 
ive effects of rust and another people from 
the more destructive effects of abrasion. 
For indolence and strenuosity are the two 
poles of one evil. And if a machine in 
disuse is a loss, an abused machine is the 
forerunner of losses manifold. 

But who in the Western world to-day, 
where accident risks are reduced to a 
minimum or covered by an insurance 
[160] 



THE ORIENTAL HERITAGE 

company, prefers to go at a reasonable, 
rational pace to his goal, if only to enjoy 
the scenery or to better enjoy the leisure 
moments of life? — or to be able, at least, 
to hear a fellow traveller who rrijight be 
calling on the way for help? Who, indeed, 
when science, like the horned Gentleman 
in Faust, holds out before us every day a 
new temptation? 

And even the Oriental stands bewildered, 
bewitched. He would turn back, if he 
could. He would follow, even to the end, 
if he did not have to run. But he will 
learn to read the directions — begin even 
with the hornbook — and take his time about 
it. If he fails eventually, however, in mas- 
tering the details of science or in grasping 
the immense scope of its vision or in the 
practical use of the machinery of progress, 
his failure should not be looked upon as a 
sign of hopeless incompetence or degenera- 
tion. His failure is the triumph of some- 
thing innate in him, which, in spite of his 
yielding to the material seductions of the 
times, prevents him from becoming a 
£161] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

human machine. And in this failure is a 
lesson for the people of the West, if they 
would profit by it. 

I said that the Oriental mind is saturated 
with traditions. But the Occidental mind, 
no matter how modern, how insurgent, is 
not wholly free from it. Nor can it or 
should it be. In fact, every nation has its 
traditions, which illumine its history and 
enrich its life. From tradition springs the 
flower of culture. On it chiefly depends 
the cultivation of the character, the cus- 
toms and manners, of a people. There is 
this difference, however, between the 
Oriental and Occidental nations : the first 
allow their traditions to grow to seed, to 
run wild and impoverish the soil, while the 
latter seldom neglect its cultivation. In 
other words, the Eastern people allow their 
traditions to accumulate throughout the 
centuries, without ever attempting to re- 
duce or overhaul the pile, while the Western 
people seldom hesitate to abandon what has 
become more or less effete in the process 
of acquiring or creating new traditions. 
[162] 



THE ORIENTAL HERITAGE 

And in this eliminating and sifting process 
is a lesson for the Orientals, if they would 
profit by it. 



(163] 



THE PATH OF VISION 
VII 

CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 

WHATEVER the characteristics of the 
age we live in, its principal tendency 
is one of exchange — exchange of culture 
as well as commodities. We give of our 
surplus for what we receive of the surplus 
of others. And not infrequently our own 
products, whether of the mind or the 
machine, undergo, as they pass from hand 
to hand, a modification, a transformation, 
which makes them welcome again at our 
door. Our luxuries come back to us as 
necessities ; our enthusiams, as firm reso- 
lutions; our ideals, as practical standards 
of living. 

And consciously or not, something is 
always being done to guard against a break 
in the circle. One wave is followed by 
another and the circling stream is ever 
flowing between the civilized nations of the 
world. Apparently it dries up sometimes 
in certain places; but in reality it has only 
[164] 



CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 

changed its direction. And now and then 
is a new source of abundance and overflow. 
And now and then too, by a mysterious 
interaction of forces, the stream reverses 
its course. 

The new source to-day is America; and 
the mighty currents, which flowed from 
the East to the West in the past, are now 
flowing from the West to the East. There 
is always too a counter-current of different 
temperature which tempers the stream and 
moderates its speed. And in this is the 
essense of exchange; in this is the assur- 
ance of the balance, the sanity, in fact, of 
nations. 

When the stream of civilization flowed 
in the past from the East, the cradle of 
religion, the counter-currents flowed from 
Venice, the cradle of trade, from Cordova, 
the cradle of reason, from Geneva, the 
cradle of intellectual freedom. But these 
in time so increased in volume and power 
that they dominated, overwhelmed the 
original westward flowing currents. The 
stream, therefore, not only changes its 
[165] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

course, but also its quality, its temper, its 
spirit. 

In other words, it once flowed from the 
fountain head of the soul — it was essential- 
ly all soul. It flows to-day from the foun- 
tain head of the mind — it is essential- 
ly all mind. But just as it was tempered 
in the past with material and intellectual 
counter-currents, it is tempered to-day 
with a counter-current of spirituality. 

This interaction of forces has curious 
results. For while the Western world is 
experiencing at present a spiritual revival, 
the East is going through the puerperal 
pains of nationalism and freedom. But 
there is a tendency in both worlds of adopt- 
ing measures that the other has renounced, 
of accepting what has been proven to be 
false or impractical, of renovating and 
wearing what has been long discarded. 
Moreover, in their eagerness to imbibe the 
spirit of the times or to harness for their 
benefit both its currents and counter-cur- 
rents, the Orientals are in danger of losing 
the most precious heritage of their civiliza- 
[166] 



CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 

tion and their culture. 

I spoke in the preceding chapter of the 
wisdom, the necessity of constantly culti- 
vating our national traditions, of applying 
to them even the eliminating process. But 
there are certain old traditions which never 
become effete and which no nation can 
abandon with profit to itself and to the 
world. As the tradition, for instance, of 
the handicrafts in the East, which is being 
rapidly undermined by the introduction of 
modern machinery. Orientals do not real- 
ize that even in the West there is a growing 
protest against the universal use of the 
machine, — against the lethal effects of 
purely mechanical power. And in their 
eagerness to imitate us in all things, to 
rival us in production, they are depriving 
the world of the artistic and beautiful 
things of the Orient. Japan, where every- 
thing is being foreignized, Europeanized, 
is a noted example. The machine there is 
fast replacing the dexterous hands of the 
artisan ; the atelier is being transformed 
into a factory; the merchant is usurping 
[167] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

the place of the man of talent; the quaint 
bazaar is becoming a market-place of brum- 
magem; the mould is destroying the spirit 
of invention ; and uniformity will ultimate- 
ly banish the creative genius of the race. 
It would be a pity, a calamity, indeed, if 
the soul of the Oriental, which he puts into 
his work, were to be destroyed by the 
hustling, strenuous, money-making spirit 
of the present day West. 

And it would be disastrous were we in 
the West to abandon that noble tradition 
of the mind, which is the heritage of 
scientific research, the fruit of intellectual 
evolution, in an effort to grasp and acquire 
the stuffy and oft times pernicious 
occultism of the Orient. Our intel- 
lectual emancipation, with its panoply of 
rationalism and its bulwarks of freedom, 
can be preserved, however, without having 
to go to the extremes of pragmatism or to 
become absolutely material. 

Machinery, or the machine-made system 
of living is defeating of the higher purpose 
of life. And to impose it upon the Orient 
[168] 



CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 

is to rob its people of the principal source 
of all their treasures. And also of their finer 
qualities, their patience, ease and content- 
ment as well as their soft and gentle man- 
ners. For even a thick layer of traditions, 
which may be productive, among better 
things, of tropic indolence and fatality, is 
better than no tradition at all. And as be- 
tween a modern Oriental who has lost his 
astractive qualities, his native virtues, who 
has relinquished the purer spiritual herit- 
age of his race and an Oriental of the old 
type, however steeped in superstition and 
religious cant, I, for one, prefer the latter. 
But both will find new inspiration and 
power, if they turn, not to the gods of 
materialism, not to the masters of the 
Machine, but to the torch-bearers of intel- 
lectual and spiritual progress lighted by the 
higher mind and fed by the purer spirit of 
Europe and America. This is the noble 
tradition, which, in every social and polit- 
ical upheaval, should be preserved and up- 
held. It is a tradition that never becomes 
effete ; and though only a few uphold it in 
[169] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

times of stress and storm, it never fails 
ultimately of its purpose. 

For the national spirit in its purity and 
vigor, is the spirit of individuals represent- 
ative of its traditions and its culture. This 
is so even in America, despite the deafen- 
ing noise of its colossal machinery. Like 
Greece and Rome, America is developing 
itself from a conflux of various nations 
and antithetical elements. The Melting 
Pot certainly has a soul. And this soul will 
certainly have a voice. And the voice of 
America, it can safely be said without 
exaggerating potentialities, is destined to 
become the voice of the world. Its culture, 
too, its arts and its traditions, which, in 
spite of the present passion of Americani- 
zation, are being colored and shaded, im- 
pregnated with alien influences, will em- 
body the noblest expression of truth and 
beauty that the higher spirit of the Orient 
and the Occident combined is capable of 
conceiving. They will embody also a 
universal consciousness, multifarious, mul- 
ticolor, prismatic. • 

[1701 



CHANGE AND EXCHANGE 

"Every nation," says Renan, "called to 
higher destinies ought to form a complete 
little world including within it the opposite 
poles." And while every people has its 
own traditions, which differ more or less 
according to the national, social and his- 
torical influences acting upon them, they 
all find a common soil in America and an 
uncommon hospitality. And from these 
traditions, developing gradually into a 
homogeneity all-embracing, will spring the 
culture and the consciousness that will 
make America, not only a great national 
power, but, what is greater, an interna- 
tional entity. 

The Oriental will better recognize him- 
self in it as well as the European. They 
will find their spirit reflected in its pris- 
matic nationalism. And the American, by 
the same token, will be mistaken for an 
Oriental in the Orient, for a European in 
Europe, though not for any other but an 
American at homve. For his national tra- 
ditions, guided by a superior international 
purpose, will represent the wholesome and 
[171] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

vital traditions of all the civilized people 
of the world. And a nation with a thick 
layer of traditions, is, as a rule, richer in 
customs and more refined in manners. 
Hence the cosmopolitanism of the Amer- 
ican of the future. Hence too his culture, 
which will harmonize with, nay, re-inforce, 
the culture of every race. This may take a 
hundred or two hundred years, but it is 
bound to come. It is the ultimate destiny 
of the Melting Pot- — its future soul and 
voice. 



[172] 



VIII 

CITIZEN AND YOGI 

FROM the revolutionary turmoil and 
shifting, transitory conditions that are 
common to-day to both the Orient and the 
Occident, something is bound to arise to 
bridge the gulf that otherwise exists 
between them. The backgrounds of pop- 
ular movements are different, to be sure, 
but the central settings are the same. The 
starting points are not identical, but the 
end in view is unmistakable in both worlds. 
The Oriental, under a staggering burden of 
traditions, is suffering from too much 
conformity; the Occidental, under an ever 
increasing burden of legislation, is suffer- 
ing from too much restraint. And while 
the one would reform his religion, the 
other, his laws, the object sought by both 
is the freedom of the individual. 

But there is this difference in the aspira- 
tions of both people : the freedom of the 
individual is still the supreme end with 
the Oriental, in spite of all his present-day 
nationalist movements, while with the Oc- 
[173] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

cidental it is only a means to an end. Self- 
conscious to a degree of violence, we in 
the West proclaim; our material needs ; but 
the people of the East, in spite of their 
growing revolt, remain sub-consciously 
spiritual. 

We have done away with religion, or the 
formulas, at least, of religion, which fet- 
tered and stunted the mind; we shall do 
away with the laws that impose upon us 
any material limitation or restraint. And 
thus, in absolute freedom only shall we 
succeed in the 'pursuit of happiness/ But 
the Oriental, however rebellious, will never 
look upon happiness as an object of pur- 
suit. He is not capable of ever becoming 
downright material or absolutely unre- 
ligious. 

Now, if we do not, though enjoying ab- 
solute freedom, succeed completely in the 
pursuit of happiness, if we should even 
fail, which is a common experience, what 
have we, having destroyed the bridges of 
the soul behind us, what have we, I ask 
to turn to for comfort and consolation? 
[174] 



CITIZEN AND YOGI 

Obviously, in this sense, the Oriental has 
the advantage. The Mohammedan, for 
instance, who is seeking to-day political 
and religious emancipation, may cease to 
go to Mecca on a pilgrimage, may deny the 
authority of the Khalif of Islam, may 
become a monogamist and a free-thinker, 
but he will continue to go to the mosque 
and though he has to stuff his ears with 
cotton against the pulpit pulings of a 
fanatical sheikh. He will continue to 
believe in Allah the author and the border- 
guard, so to speak, of human freedom. 
And should he 'pursue* happiness, instead 
of walking indifferently in its path, he will 
do so in his usual manner, that is casually, 
leisurely, and even circuitously. And 
should he fail, he has always something 
higher to pursue. In reverence and awe 
he will continue to seek the divine, which 
even in the darkest depths of fatalism, 
never loses for him its potency and grace. 

In India the antithesis is more pro- 
nounced — the parallel more interesting. 
The Hindu says, I arri) a part of the whole, 
[175] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

which is God. The European is a part of 
the whole, which is the social system or 
the political machine. But whether as a 
citizen or a yogi, the individual has ceased 
to exist. And of the two absorbing, non- 
entitizing mediums, the political and the 
religious, no two right-thinking people will 
disagree as to which is nearer to the ideal 
of the soul. Personally, if I am to be 
effaced as a human entity, I prefer to sub- 
mit to the spiritual process, whether it be 
based on a dogma, a vision, or a truth. 
And in this, I am not contenting myself 
with an illusion, as it might be supposed ; 
on the contrary, I am pursuing the prac- 
tical course of wisdom. 

But complete effacement is not possible 
in either case. Nature is against it ; super- 
nature, or the supreme source of the light 
within us, frowns upon it. I am a 
part of the All, but I am free. And rrfy 
freedom ends necessarily where the free- 
dom of the All, whether God or the State, 
begins. This deep truth, which the Mo- 
hammedan recognizes, has been overlooked 
[176] 



CITIZEN AND YOGI 

in India and is scorned to-day in Europe 
and America. The anarchy of caprice 
prevailing in that part of the world is not 
better nor worse than the anarchy of 
thought prevalent in the western world. 
And strange as it may seem, the tendency 
of both people is to succeed each other in 
their failures as well as their triumphs. 
But the manifest destiny of the world is 
fortunately bound with the spirit of en- 
lightenment and culture. 

Hitherto, the political state with the 
Hindu, like the divine state with the Eu- 
ropean, has been more or less negligible. 
Hence the material supremacy of the one 
and the spiritual abnormalities of the other. 
Hence, too, the failure of both as indivi- 
duals. For whether in Nirvana, in Fatal- 
ismj, or in the State, the dwarfing and 
effacing tendency is the same. If the cit- 
izen, therefore, could be taught to appre- 
ciate the yogi's abstractions and the yogi, 
the citizen's political creed,— if a compro- 
mise between them and a rapport are 
possible, — there is hope for the accession 
[177] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

of the individual to his primal state, where 
he will retain his pristine dignity and main- 
tain himself as a human entity in the divine 
and political systems of the world, without 
being below or above them, subordinate or 
superior. He will build within their boun- 
daries, the castle, the fortress of his free- 
dom. 

But to build it on a political fiction is as 
bad as building it on a religious chimera. 
For whether as an instrument in the hands 
of a government or in the hands of a 
spiritual hierarchy, man is equally a slave. 
Indeed, the 'part-of-the-whole' idea, when 
announced and accepted as a dogma or a 
law, is a libel upon humankind, an insult 
to its innate nobility. No, the individual 
is not a means to an end. 

What avails it to know that I am free, 
if I can not realize this freedom in a 
definite, specific existence? But can it be 
realized wholly by a revolt only against 
a hierarchy or a state? It depends upon 
the nature and scope of the revolt. If we 
are concerned in breaking the fetters that 
[178] 



CITIZEN AND YOGI 

are fastened upon our bodies and souls by 
external agencies only, we are doomed to 
failure. But if we become aware of the 
fetters, which we, in the sub-consciousness 
of centuries of submission, have fastened 
upon the spirit within us and strive to free 
ourselves of them first, then we are certain 
to triumph. 

For freedom of the spirit is the corner- 
stone of all freedom. And this can be 
attained only by realizing its human limit- 
ations and recognizing its divine claim. It 
might be said too that freedom is to spirit 
what gravity is to matter. It is inherent 
in it and limited, yea, fettered by it. To 
know and recognize this truth, is to rise to 
the highest form) of freedom. Epictetus 
the slave was free. Socrates in prison was 
nevertheless free. Jesus on the cross was 
absolutely free. 

But this transcendentalism, some will 
object, is not practical with the modern 
spirit of progress. It is the metaphysical 
philosopher's idea that freedom of the 
spirit is only the consciousness of freedom. 
[179] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

If this were so, to follow the objection, 
then the Hindu has attained the ideal state 
and our modern civilization is a hollow 
mockery. In a sense, this is true. But 
the freedom of the Hindu, who is steeped 
in spiritual cant and quackery, is nothing 
now but a sublimated resignation. Nor 
would he be better off, if, in his triumph 
of revolt, he substituted it for political 
freedom. His salvation, the salvation of 
man, is in the recognition of the divine 
link between the two. To detach them or 
to seek only the realization of one of them, 
has the tendency of making of m&n either 
an ogre or a myth. If the one is made the 
complement of the other, however, nay, if 
spiritual freedom is recognized as the basis 
of political freedom, the highest degree of 
emancipation is then possible. 

Further, to make my meaning plain. I 
am free to go the length of my freedom, 
I admit. But is it not a common hun^an 
experience that doing so, I reach a point 
where I find myself powerless, where I 
realize that I am imprisoned in time and 
[180] 



CITIZEN AND YOGI 

space? Here are my material limitations; 
and only knowledge or the recognition of 
my spiritual potentialities, can save me 
from the pangs of sorrow and disappoint- 
ment. Indeed, there is in man an infinite 
possibility of spiritual development. And 
if only for this reason, he should not be 
sacrificed to the state or to a spiritual hier- 
archy or to the species. 



[181] 



THE PATH OF VISION 
IX 

THE CURIOSITY OF THE 
OCCIDENTAL 

CURIOSITY with the Occidentals, 
though it degenerates at times into a 
vulgar inquisitiveness, is a commendable 
quality of the mind. It is accepted as a 
shiboleth of culture; it is condoned as an 
avowal of ignorance; it is welcomed as a 
bid for intellectual or even social intimacy : 
but it is seldom looked upon as a breach of 
etiquette. 

But with the Orientals, curiosity is de- 
cidedly bad manners. Accept the exterior 
and divine the interior, is generally the 
prevailing humor. Indeed, the curious one 
is invariably looked upon with either sus- 
picion or disdain. He is shunned as a 
beggar, rebuked as a thief. For the Orient- 
al would prefer a man to pick his purse 
than to pick his heart or mind. Where the 
impulse, however, is irresistible, defying, 
the custom is to apply the subtle, circuit- 



THE CURIOSITY OF THE OCCIDENTAL 

ous method. That is why, I suppose, so 
much more is accomplished in a given time 
by the people of the western world. 

The tendency in one case is to overtax 
the imagination, in the other, to overtax 
the mind. The Oriental, it might be said, 
grows by repression, the Occidental, by 
expression. But both methods, to be sure, 
do not exclude the possibility of a morbid 
growth. On the contrary, they stimulate it. 

The Oriental's curiosity about nature, 
for instance, is transformed into super- 
latives of admiration. He approaches it 
ecstatically, poetically and revels in its ex- 
ternal beauty and loveliness. The Occi- 
dental approaches it designedly, scientific- 
ally and tries to get at the secret of its 
power to transform it into material well- 
being. The difference is not only in the 
point of view, but in the procedure as well. 

The reaction is not always startling, nor 
always agreeable. A Persian and a 
Parisian were dining one day with a French 
woman in a Paris restaurant. She was of 
a reticent beauty, affecting the mysterious. 
[183] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

She spread a banquet of her studied de- 
mure charms before both her admirers, 
but was very careful not to unveil her soul. 
The Parisian talked to her in the argot of 
the French novel, which she understood 
and accepted at its face value; the Persian 
addressed her in a language of repressed 
emotions, which she likely misunderstood, 
but better appreciated. The Parisian am- 
used her with his undisguised curiosity, the 
Persian attracted her with a silent some- 
thing that was burrowing perhaps under 
her feet or secretly fingering the forbid- 
ding veil of her mystery. 

And she was least likely to mistake the 
motive that wore a mask. She feared the 
Oriental, it is true, but she was fascinated 
by him. For she felt that to him she was, 
above all and beneath all, a woman and, 
therefore, a mystery. And as such, she 
should be reverently approached or austere- 
ly eschewed. The Persian's curiosity, if he 
had any, permitted of no other alternative. 
The result was that her fear and suspi- 
cion, although he did not recognize her 
[184] 



THE CURIOSITY OF THE OCCIDENTAL 

intellectual attainments and her brilliancy 
of mind, were not devoid of a certain qual- 
ity of respect, secret or expressed. And 
that is because he was, though obviously 
incurious, unquestionably sincere. The 
Parisian, on the other hand, though his 
curiosity was engaging, animating, — though 
he delighted in the banquet she spread be- 
fore him of her intellectual charms and was 
lavish in his adulation, — could not but 
betray the insincerity that wore for its 
secret purpose the mask of culture. 

Even with the occidentals, curiosity may 
be complex in its origin and significance. 
It is the instigator of all shades of moods 
and manners. For whether direct or art- 
ful, it may be innate or acquired or as- 
sumed. And it may be actuated by self- 
interest, by pride, and sometimes by snob- 
bery. In the first, one wishes to know and 
to profit by the knowledge; in the second, 
one seeks knowledge only to know what 
others ignore ; while in the third, the curious 
one is but the slave of fashion. 

There is still another phase to this peck- 
[185] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

ing tendency of the mind. Often in socie- 
ty, curiosity is but a kind of espionage; it 
is indisputably the handmaiden of gossip. 
But clothed in good manners, it passes as 
one of the excellences of human inter- 
course; and not infrequently it engenders 
scandal and brings about the ruin of an 
established home or fortune. 

On the other hand, there is the individual 
that affects an incuriousness only to im- 
press upon us a real, or to flaunt a fictitious, 
superiority. When one is well travelled, 
well read, — has had a varied and rich ex- 
perience, — has tasted of all the cups and 
courses of life; is as familiar amidst the 
superstitious squalor of Calcutta as in the 
high-lackered halls of London or New 
York ; is terribly at ease with the f allaheen 
of Egypt as with the dons of Oxford, one's 
curiosity is seldom moved. But even in 
its latencies and repressions, in its immo- 
bility, however serene, it can be provoking, 
irritating. And what is worse, it can be 
insincere. 

The gentleman in the centre of the 
[186] 



THE CURIOSITY OF THE OCCIDENTAL 

drawing room), surrounded by a knot of 
admirers, has wonderful dignity and poise, 
is to the manner born. Yes, indeed. He is* 
one of the celebrities of the day: — a poet, 
scholar, diplomat and an illustrious citizen 
of the Republic. But when you are relat- 
ing in his presence some curious instance 
of racial degeneracy or superiority in the 
aborigines of Yucatan, or some idiomatic 
vernacular enormities of a religious revival 
in America, or some anthropologic anom- 
alies in the Bulus of Central Africa, he 
listens patronizingly and nods with an all- 
knowing brow, to be sure; but when he 
gets back to his library, he will hasten, I 
promise you, to the dictionary or the en- 
cyclopedia to look up a word or a name he 
deliberately remembered which had es- 
caped his circumambient comprehension. 
His lack of curiosity is comhiendable, in- 
deed; but you wish, after having politely 
unbuttoned your mind and bowed before 
the image of his sublime reserve, that he 
would condescend at least to an interro- 
gation. 

i.187] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

The incuriousness of the Oriental is only 
partly akin to this. For while the absurd 
gravity of the venerable sheikh might sit 
amidst profundities unmoved, indifferent, 
serene, there is little or nothing behind it 
to spur him to a dictionary or an encyclo- 
dia or even a book of travel. Whether in 
the East or in the West, there is something 
unpleasant, indecorous — I had almost said 
indecent — in the attitude of these culture- 
conscious princes of dignity and poise. 
Even at best, it is an attitude that provokes 
hostility. It argues against the 'sweetness 
and light* of culture. And when you are 
certain that your words in the end will 
cozen out of the lips of reserve but an 
exclamation of mashallah, you turn with 
alarcity to a hammal or a fakir instead ; or 
to a dapper clerk or a grocer, when you 
know that your remarks are to be punc- 
tuated by Solemn Dignity with the vapid- 
ities of 'how-curious' or the vaguenesses of 
'how-interesting'. 



[188] 



THE LYING ORIENTAL 

'T^HERE is a parasite in man, which no 
-** amount of energy and labor can 
wholly exterminate. It creeps through the 
complex structure of modern life, clings 
instinctively to every available thread of 
human intercourse, and finally, like a silk 
worm, weaves its own cocoon in the heart 
only to emerge from it better armed. 

For no matter how abounding our ener- « 
gy, how productive our labors, we find at 
a certain stage of our achievements that 
external agencies, often, it is true, of our 
own making, are unremittingly assiduous 
in our service. A man of fortune can not 
stop his money from doing his Work ; a 
successful man of genius can not place a 
ban upon his reputation ; an inventor is 
helpless against the ever increasing activ- 
ities of his invention; and even a laborer, 
with recognized honesty and skill, can not 
tell how much of his savings he actually 
earned with the sweat of his brow. 

Thus we live more or less upon our own 
[189] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

reputation or upon the reputation of our 
people. And often we suffer from the re- 
actions of moral and material forces, 
which, passing out of our hands, become 
uncontrollable or are distorted in the hands 
of others. We give, we produce, we 
create; but what we receive in return is 
either rediculous or fabulous. Something 
is abroad that contributes materially to our 
triumph or defeat — that makes the one 
grotesque, the other tragic 

A truthful man, for instance, may be of 
a people that is noted for lying and equivo- 
cation; a dishonest man may be of a race 
that has earned a reputation for truthful- 
ness. Herein the parasite thrives. For to 
succeed, the one need not overtax his 
ingenuity, the other need not adhere strict- 
ly to the traditional virtue of his people. 
Both find resources or a name, at least, 
which they can freely utilize. The Oriental, 
though he be of the lowest quality of mind 
and soul, is credited with imagination and 
intuitive wisdom; while the Occidental's 
integrity, though he be a jail bird, is often 
[190] 



THE LYING ORIENTAL 

taken for granted. 

Moreover, certain Occidental minds ac- 
quire a kind of candor which is more 
insidious than the craftiness of Orientals. 
And it has the gesture of finality that 
characterizes the advertisement or the 
poster of modern times. It is an asset 
which no Oriental subtlety and chicanery 
can equal. For what is so profitable as a 
reputation greatly advertised? Or even so 
damning ? 

The Oriental, when he tells the truth, is 
seldom believed. The Occidental, when he 
tells a lie, is seldom doubted. The naive 
truthfulness of the one goes for nothing, 
while the specious frankness of the other 
seldom fails of its purpose. Thus, we pay 
dearly for our prejudices as for our illu- 
sions. But even though we concede that 
truth-speaking with the Occidental is the 
rule, with the Oriental, the exception, we 
must not fail to observe the discrepancies 
in both standards. We are on our guard 
against craftiness however cleverly con- 
cealed ; but we are often duped by a frank- 
[1?! ] 



THE PATH OF VISION 

ness ingeniously conceived and practiced. 

Indeed, we suffer more from the implicit 
confidence we repose in the slyboot who 
has earned a reputation for candor and 
straightforward dealing. We feed the para- 
site in him. And it is a poor and unprofit- 
able skepticism that only works one way. 
Honesty itself ceases to be a virtue when 
it is made a means to an ignoble end. And 
the Oriental, whose craftiness is often 
practised in self-defense, negatively, sel- 
dom regards it as a positive method, a 
material virtue, an instrument of success. 

It was Bismark, I think, who conceived 
the idea of sometimes speaking the truth 
to deceive his antagonists. An originality 
in political tactics which the Oriental 
diplomat might well imitate, and to better 
advantage. And when the Orienatl mer- 
chant takes to advertising, he w T ill further 
realize the advantage of lapsing periodically 
into truth. His wonted subtlety will then 
become more subtle, more complex, more 
confounding. And the people of the West, 
in changing their point of view regarding 
[192] 



THE LYING ORIENTAL 

his veracity, will be adding to his capital 
while he lounges resignedly upon his divan. 

For what virtue can not be distorted by 
a motive, debauched by an end? To lie 
in self-defense is certainly more pardon- 
able than to lie in defending or promoting 
our material interests. Besides, no one is 
capable of pursuing an unchanging course 
in this or that direction : neither equivoca- 
tion nor f orthrightness can be made elastic 
enough to cover our shame or our honor. 
Silence alone can do that. It is certain, 
however, that intermittent honesty is worse 
than unremitting rascality; for a man who 
now and then is truthful that he might the 
better palm off his pinchback on the world, 
is more detestable indeed than he who lies 
instinctively and only incidentally tells the 
truth. 

And the parasite is active in them both, 
for they both depend more or less on the 
fiat of an assumption. Indeed, we are all 
disposed to sit back at times and let our 
reputation do our work — the work rather 
of a commercial traveller, a press-agent or 
N931 



THE PATH OF VISION 

a drudge. How much, in fact, we pay for 
a name. And yet, a good name is a part- 
nership between the individual and society. 
Nay, it is too often a Trust whose stock 
is watered with gumption and gullibility. 

The business man, the opera singer, the 
moving-picture actor, who start by making 
a high bid for our confidence or admiration 
and succeed in getting it, invariably end 
by boasting in electric superlatives on the 
house-tops of the city — they convert our 
confidence into cash. And in the end, we 
find ourselves paying more for the clap- 
trap and flamboyancy than the real object 
they herald — more for the 'blurb' than the 
song. 

It is not so bad in the Orient, where a 
name is not a substantial element in values. 
A Persian rug, for instance, is a Persian 
rug and not one made by the great Mirza 
of Shiraz. But the Orientals, as I said, 
are fast acquiring the trick of sophistica- 
tion. And what is worse, they are inclined 
now and then to make truth-speaking an 
overture, at least, to their dealings. But 
11911 



THE LYING ORIENTAL 

whether with them or with us, a certain 
degree and form only of the truth, is more 
pernicious indeed than falsehood itself. 

Once in Damascus I saw a merchant 
selling an English tourist some ancient 
coins, which were probably made in Ger- 
many. Their patina seemed authentic 
and real. They even smelled of the 
earth. But the merchant sorted them out 
into two lots, carefully sifting and exam- 
ining, and finally said, These are false, my 
Lord, these are genuine. And he swore by 
Allah and the Prophet that he was speaking 
the truth. Which was quite unexpected 
by the tourist, who was much impressed. 
He was in fact taken in. For by admitting 
that some of the coins were not genuine, 
the wily shop-keeper was able to sell to 
mylord some of the others, which were 
equally false. I spoke with him afterwards 
and he admitted to me — told me the other 
half of the truth — that the European who 
sold him the antiquified coins taught him 
also the trick. 

1195] 



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